Keeping one eye on the sky, another underground and both feet planted on the floor is a good trick if you can do it. And that is exactly how Thames Television International is exploiting the rich income promised by new television technology.

The sky eye is on the lookout for broadcast satellites, the underground eye for cable connections, and the firmly-planted feet are vital for anyone who wants to understand and explore the coming revolution in the way viewers use their television sets.

There are three potential rivals to the TV companies who at present dominate the airwaves. The first, video, is with us right now. Nearly a million British homes already possess a videotape recorder which gives them access not only to off-air programmes but a large and growing catalogue of pre-recorded films, music shows, look-and-learn cassettes and golden oldie television material.

The second threat comes from Direct Broadcast Satellites (hereafter called DBS). In America, satellites are already beaming programmes to local cable operators who pipe pictures to subscribers. And if the cash and the political consensus can be found, there could be a DBS perched above every country in Europe by 1990.

Cable itself is the third strand. Once again America leads the way, mainly because the cable was needed to improve signal quality. But now, many entrepreneurs provide viewers with an alternative service to the major networks, and American subscribers can buy anything from month-old movies to ‘live’ sex-shows from companies offering up to 50 different channels at the touch of a button.

Britain, of course, is a long way off that stage, and the initial demand for cable might be rather limited. But if the forthcoming experiments in a number of areas already cabled up are successful, fibre optic ‘narrow-casters’ could soon be spreading their tentacles under every street in the land.

If that happens, the search for programming to fill the new hours will be on, and indeed in America, the hue and cry is already at fever pitch.

So instead of fighting the alternative invaders, TTI has concluded that it is healthier to join them, and Thames material is already finding its way into the new markets.

Mike Phillips, who is TTI’s Controller of Commercial Development explains. ‘We’re already deeply involved in video, partly through the High Street outlets of our parent companies, Thorn-EMI and Rediffusion. There are now nine Thames titles in the EMI Video list, and they include Botanic Man, Swan Lake, The World At War and Kenny Everett. There’s a Benny Hill compilation, the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Shows from 1978 and 1980, some marvellous gymnastics, and the first of Alan Ayckbourn’s Norman Conquests plays trilogy, which Thames screened a while back. There’s obviously a great deal more in the pipeline, now that ITV has reached agreement over royalty payments with the talent unions.’

Much of this material will also find itself spinning profits at the rate of 700 revs per minute, when the video disc joins the battle next autumn.

Discs can be stamped in bulk much more cheaply than tape (which has to be run off in ‘real time’). They can provide stereo sound, and their 54,000 picture frames per disc can store vast amounts of information. On the other hand, they can’t record, and two, (possibly three) incompatible systems are already vying for market share.

Two systems – Philips’ Laser Vision and the VHD disc made by JVC and adopted by Thorn-EMI – use a hard-wearing groove less disc while RCA have developed a cheaper, less-sophisticated disc not unlike a conventional audio LP in appearance. All three are about the size of an ordinary record, played on machines no bigger than a music centre. The players will sell for between £350 and £5(M), and the discs for around £15.

The Thorn-EMI/Rediffusion connections will ensure Thames a prominent place in the market. When launch day comes next year, Everett, Bellamy & Co will be on show in up to 7,000 rental and retail outlets in the chain of wholly-owned or contracted Thorn-EMI and Rediffusion shops featuring the new VHD disc system. But, says Phillips, Thames material is also available to distributors using the other disc formats, so TTI hope for massive penetration of the new markets as soon as the discs hit the High Street.

As for satellites, Muir Sutherland (TTI’s Managing Director) is still fairly sceptical. ‘The DBS is still a long way off in Britain and Europe and it will take a lot of political will to persuade governments that foreign-owned satellites should be allowed to invade their broadcasting airspace.’

‘And I’m not sure how many viewers will want to spend the money for the big dish aerials; there are still many technical problems in providing a reliable service. Satellites are going to be far more valuable as a means of distributing material to cable operators, as in America.’ Joe McCann (TTI’s Controller of Television Sales) and Don Taffner (their US Representative), have created a lot of interest in these new outlets for Thames programming. They’re finalising sales of Benny Hill to Home Box Office, Napoleon and Love and Swan Lake to CBS, Warner Amex are buying The Tomorrow People for their children’s channel, and other very large deals are close to completion.

‘We think Thames has a huge stockpile of material to offer the new cable operations,’ says Joe, ‘and they are also keen to bring their projects to us as well.’

All sorts of joint-production possibilities are opened to Thames International. But says Mike Phillips, ‘We musn’t get it out of perspective. Co-financing never covers the actual cost of making a programme, but it does help offset the cost and it might help us to go ahead with projects we couldn’t afford on our own.’

In the meantime, TTI is looking at all the new American cable operations and selling appropriate programmes where it can. Thames was offered an exclusive deal with one organisation, much like the deal the BBC has just made with RCTV. one of the cable newcomers, but as TTI already earns more from the USA than the recorded BBC annual guarantee, it prefers to play the field and exploit different markets in different ways.

As Muir Sutherland says, ‘We’re delighted that the BBC have agreed to enter into an exclusive deal in the USA, if only because it means that the other channels can’t get their hands on BBC programmes, and puts us in a stronger position.’

The post The sky’s the limit appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.

One of the chanciest moments of all for This Is Your Life came in September 1985. The target: William Roache, who plays Ken Barlow in Coronation Street; the location: the Rovers Return public house.

Eamonn Andrews was all set to surprise William but, with just minutes to go, we realised we had lost the Red Book.

I thought Eamonn had it; he thought I had it.

William was on his way when I spotted a large, red accounts book. I grabbed it and handed it to Eamonn just as William arrived. Twelve million people watched those opening moments the one and only time when an accounts ledger has doubled as the Red Book and nobody noticed… not even William Roache.

We found the book in time for the rest of the programme. Someone had picked it up out of curiosity and put it down behind the Rovers bar!

Jimmy Cricket was the subject of what turned out to be one of the last programmes Eamonn presided over before he died in November 1987.

We had smuggled in Jimmy’s sister Evelyn from Australia. The day before the show she asked if we would have any objection to her doing some Christmas shopping in Oxford Street, in London.

The West End was jam-packed and it seemed a 10,000-to-one chance that Evelyn, the last surprise on the show, would run into her brother.

Off she went into the milling throng of Oxford Street – and bumped straight into Jimmy.

Her nerve held. She told him she had come over for a family gathering that was supposed to be a surprise. The real surprise came later, of course.

Maurice Leonard, now the producer of What’s My Line?, used to be a researcher on This Is Your Life and had acquired a bit of a reputation for being accident-prone.

Knowing that actor Anthony Quinn was an essential ingredient of a 1978 programme about Muhammad Ali’s life, Maurice flew to Los Angeles and based himself in Quinn’s Beverly Hills hotel.

Quinn’s filming schedule kept him working until all hours and Maurice, waiting with a film crew, became increasingly anxious as the deadline loomed.

At last Quinn appeared down the main hotel stairway. Maurice jumped and rushed straight into a large plate-glass mirror. Minutes later he woke up to be told by Quinn that they had just finished filming the message to Ali and he had less than 40 minutes to get to the airport so that he could catch his flight home.

Months later Maurice was sent off to collect sexy actress Ursula Andress from London’s Heathrow airport. She had flown in from Los Angeles to appear on the programme we were doing on Charles Aznavour.

Ursula arrived with a very large suitcase and Maurice, being a gentleman, lifted it into the boot of her car. He pulled a muscle and was bent double. When the car arrived at the studios in Teddington we were all treated to a wonderful sight.

Maurice, in the back of the car, was lying face down across Ursula’s lap while she massaged his bare back, a labour of love she had performed all the way from Heathrow. Just one of the perks of the job!

One of the great delights of This Is Your Life is the chance to honour the life of someone completely unknown to the public.

Kitty Wilson has fostered 50 children and in March 1983 seemed to us just such a person who should be recognised.

We persuaded friends to invite her to leave her home in the Midlands for a day’s shopping in London. When she arrived at Liverpool Street station, Eamonn and the film crew were well hidden behind some large packing boxes.

The train pulled in, three hidden cameras rolled, Eamonn pulled a large hat over his eyes and turned up his coat collar. He went up to the lady, put his hand on her shoulder and smiled.

‘Hello, Kitty,’ he said. The woman looked completely blank. Eamonn looked over at me and I shook my head. It was the wrong woman. The resemblance was astonishing, but I spotted ‘our’ Kitty a little further back…

By the time Eamonn had turned and said ‘This is your life’ to the real Kitty Wilson, the other woman had gone, melting into the crowd.

I still wonder who she was and what story she would have had to tell. Perhaps she’s even reading this article.

The Kitty story was another of those incidents that continue to make This Is Your Life one of television’s most excitingly dangerous, unpredictable programmes.

I remember when my son Gregory was born, on 19 December 1972. The obstetrician who delivered him turned to me in one of those quieter moments and said: ‘So you do This Is Your Life. When are you going to run out of people?’

‘As long as you keep delivering them,’ I replied, ‘we won’t.’

Malcolm Morris was talking to STEWART KNOWLES

The post The day we lost the Big Red Book appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.

Calamities and confusions are a natural, almost inevitable, part of the general untidiness of This Is Your Life. Far from being neat and orderly, it is a dangerous programme, totally unpredictable. Anything can go wrong and most things have.

Each week, at the start of the programme, I have to ask presenter Michael Aspel to bring us to within seconds of the allotted 25-and-a-half minutes, but he cannot know precisely what people are going to say or how long they are going to take to say it. It is nerve-racking and, sometimes, it shows. In a recent programme, Mich-ael had to introduce one of the guests, Paddy Ashdown, the Social and Liberal Democrats’ leader. In one of those classic moments of mental confusion, he referred to him first as Peggy Ashdown… and then as Paddy Ashcroft.

Mostly, these days, the programmes are recorded but, as far as I am concerned, they might as well be live because, if anything goes wrong, we cannot, as with most taped shows, stop and start again. Once we have started, we don’t stop for anything.

In one programme we will be showing soon, we were almost stopped before we started.

We knew that our chosen subject would be travelling by train from Yorkshire to London.

The idea was for the film crew to get on the same train and hide themselves away in the guard’s van. Then Michael, heavily disguised as a ticket inspector with moustache and glasses, was supposed to get on the train when it stopped at Stevenage.

It started to go wrong when half the film crew got on the wrong train, although, luckily, that was sorted out when they were able to join the rest of the crew at Stevenage.

We already knew where our subject would be sitting but, as Michael approached the carriage, the lights went out and we were in total darkness. One of our engineers helped to restore the lights and we really felt we were ready to go. But no…

As Michael was about to enter the compartment, the cameraman hissed: ‘Stop – the tape has jammed.’

By the time everything was working and the lights were on again, the train was pulling into King’s Cross station. The woman – and that’s all I will tell you about her — was just pulling her suitcase down from the rack when Michael presented her with the red book. That was a very hairy one.

Another that had all the makings of being tricky was Phil Collins, the rock star/actor.

We had decided to do Collins before the present series began but were warned by several people that, at the sight of Michael and the red book, he would run a mile.
Another difficulty was that Collins knew Michael well and had recently been on his chat show.

The plan was to lure Collins to Covent Garden by telling him that an American station – one we invented specially – wanted to do an interview to plug the film Buster.

We decided we would have Michael as a busker and persuaded him not to shave for a few days.

We surrounded him with other ‘buskers’. Phil Collins quickly recognised Bob Geldof and Midge Ure, but Michael was able to get close enough to present the red book and say: ‘Phil Collins, this is your life.’

Collins, as it turned out, was delighted and agreed to do the show. Had he refused or ‘done a runner’, he would only have been the third in the programme’s long history.

Soccer star Danny Blanchflower, in fact, continues to hold the record as the only British This Is Your Life subject who refused to be on the programme when he had been nabbed by Eamonn Andrews.

That was in 1956, a year after the BBC had inherited the series from America, where it originated. The BBC brought the series to an end in 1961 – something I am sure they have lived to regret – after successfully netting about 200 subjects. ITV restored it in 1968, since when we have screened a further 500 programmes.

Author Richard Gordon became the second subject to walk off. His response to being confronted by Eamonn was one five-letter expletive.

It was live then and I was directing. We faded out the picture and screened an alternative, recorded programme on the actor Sam Kydd. While that was going out, Eamonn was able to persuade Gordon to continue with the programme we had prepared and it was transmitted later.

Weeks of work go into tracking down all the people we want to have on a particular programme. Secrecy is of paramount importance.

We even have codewords for our subjects and I’ll let you into the secret of some of those next week.

But every so often, for one reason or another, the programme has to be scrapped because the subject has found out beforehand and the element of surprise is ruined.

The first programme in Britain went out on 22 July 1955, and we learned all those years ago that This Is Your Life rarely runs smoothly it had to be replanned at the last minute.

Ralph Edwards, the American deviser of the programme had flown in from Los Angeles to supervise and the presenter was to be the 32-year-old Eamonn Andrews.

Eamonn, who sadly died in November 1987, was then presenting What’s My Line? and had seen the programme in America. He persuaded the BBC to do a British version.

The first guest was to have been the soccer idol Stanley Matthews. A week before the programme went out, Matthews read in his morning paper – the Daily Sketch – that he was to be honoured by the new This Is Your Life programme and the whole thing was dead from that moment.

Panic. An alternative programme had to be devised. Ralph Edwards told Eamonn the ‘new’ subject would be boxing champion Freddie Mills.

Eamonn brought Freddie to Shepherd’s Bush and sat in the audience with him. Ralph had given Eamonn the red book, which had a cover on it, hiding the name of the subject.

When Eamonn pulled the cover away he read the words outloud: “This Is Your Life… Eamonn Andrews’ and received the book from Edwards, compère of the original US series.

Ronnie Barker and Derek Nimmo were two stars who found out by accident that they were to be the subjects of ‘This Is Your Life’. And so the programmes were scrapped. The same happened to Cyd Charisse, who picked up a telephone extension and heard arrangements being made with her husband.

Incredibly, in all the programmes we have done, only about 20 of our subjects have been lost.

In 1985, when the legendary American dancing star Cyd Charisse was in London, she was staying at a hotel with her husband Tony Martin.

Final details of the programme were being discussed with Martin when Cyd picked up the extension and learned that she was to be the next subject. Another Life had been killed.

In 1979, a researcher telephoned London’s Savoy Hotel, where husky-voiced Elaine Stritch was living with her husband. Perhaps a little overeager, the researcher announced himself immediately. ‘Hello, Mr Stritch, I’m from This Is Your Life and we are thinking of doing a programmes on your wife. What do you think?’

The silence lasted six seconds. A lifetime. ‘I think that’s great, honey,’ came the famous voice. ‘But this is Elaine Stritch speaking. My husband is out at the moment.’

These days, if anybody answers the telephone in the office, they do not announce the fact that it is where This Is Your Life comes from. And that lesson was learned from an incident in 1979.

Ronnie Barker’s wife, Joy, had been putting the telephone down quickly whenever Ronnie happened to appear in the room, telling him it was a series of wrong numbers.

Soon, Ronnie became more and more puzzled. Was it, perhaps, a lover? One day, Ronnie saw Joy hide a card in her underwear drawer. He had to look. On the card was a telephone number and a man’s name. Ronnie called the number.

A man answered. ‘Hello, This Is Your Life office here. Can I help you?’ For us, it was worse than a lover. It was another cancelled programme.

Every so often, the news of our plans gets out and none of us knows how it happens. We planned to ‘do’ Jimmy Young in 1983 and were waiting for a particular head of state to become available to appear in the programme.

We went ahead with the rest of the programme and it was over my morning coffee, days before we were to go on air, that I read in the gossip columns: ‘This Is Your Life sets up to do Jimmy Young.’ I’m quite sure the top politician had been able to keep a secret, but somebody else hadn’t.

Derek Nimmo was another ‘nearly ran’. We did all the research, made all the telephone calls, had a very interesting programme prepared and were just a few days away from telling his story when somebody slipped a note under the door of his theatre dressing-room in London, where he was appearing.

The note read: ‘BEWARE WEDNESDAY… THIS IS YOUR LIFE.’ And it was goodbye to our programme.

Malcolm Morris was talking to STEWART KNOWLES

The post Secrets of ‘Life’ – The ones who got away appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.

LISTENERS who tune in to Kenny Everett on London’s Capital Radio are finding it increasingly difficult to listen to his jokes without imagining the facial expressions that go with them. Television exposure can have a strange effect on a radio disc jockey and even on the airwaves frequented by Everett’s opposition, many BBC Radio 1 stars are going through the same audio-visual motions.

After all, who can listen to Jimmy Savile without seeing him wave one of his huge cigars at the microphone? Is it possible to lend an ear to Noel Edmonds without conjuring up a mental picture of bearded elegance?

To be a top disc jockey in the electronic Eighties, you are going to have to be a video jockey as well. Radio stars, it seems, have to be seen as well as heard these days and good jockeys have to be able to change horses in mid-scream.

Kenny Everett is leading the field at the moment and it is becoming difficult to buy a packet of crisps without his face on the packet. Some newspaper critics have even been calling him “the most creative disc jockey in the country”. And yet is he a disc jockey at all? Like Edmonds, Savile, Terry Wogan and Michael Aspel, Everett can spin a disc as well as smile into a camera but he refuses to slot into any kind of pigeon hole. The award winning Kenny Everett Video Show (Monday) is very difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t seen it. It is brilliantly innovative and childishly simple at the same time. The show’s producer/director David Mallet lapsed into silence when asked to describe Everett. “Kenny,” he said after a moment, “is God’s gift to video. What you have to remember.” he advised cheerfully. “is that what he does on television has nothing to do with him being a disc jockey. Come to think of it, what he does on radio has nothing to do with him being a disc jockey either. On the Video Show he is a sort of rock ‘n’ roll Monty Python.”

So he is, but unlike the Python team, Everett merely projects different facets of his own personality. Any of his creations are instantly recognised by people who know him and although his influences are easy to spot he remains a true original. He is a space age Spike Milligan who loves the Beatles’ music and has followed in the footsteps of radio pioneer Jack Jackson. Like Jackson, Everett paints sound pictures on radio, and moving to television was a logical step.

But not every D.J. will adapt so readily. There is a subtle distinction between a D.J. and a broadcaster in the radio world and even the most experienced radio stars can come to grief when they try TV.

NOT SO LONG ago the big four in the D.J. arena were Jimmy Savile, Pete Murray, Alan Freeman and David Jacobs. Although Jacobs did well for a time on Juke Box Jury only Jimmy Savile is still a television star today.

Once upon a time the radio D.J. could be a smooth talking voice in between pop records. But nowadays, a star on a low-budget independent local radio station has to be able to interview famous people, host phone-ins and be seen at local functions. Not every D.J. can become a Jimmy Young and interview world leaders on their “prog.” but the trend is definitely towards broadcasters and away from frenetic D.J.s who send out a stream of cliches.

When Buggles topped the charts recently with their catchy but prophetic Video Killed the Radio Star many people in the radio industry had a good listen to the lyrics. Buggles equated video’s impact on radio with the talkies’ impact on silent movies. As Buggles put it so eloquently: “Pictures came and broke your heart, put the blame on V.C.R.” (video cassette recorder).

But while video will definitely not kill the radio star, it will have an enormous impact on the radio business. The opportunities to cross over from audio to visual broadcasting will increase dramatically in the Eighties and, with the advent of the video disc (essentially, a long-playing record that produces not only sound but pictures as well-via your TV screen) the relevance of playing records on the radio will decrease somewhat.

Last month several events occurred which proved that the writing was on the wall. Pye Records launched the first video sales force, a company called Film-a-Disc started trading and two giant American record companies combined to produce video disc equipment. Pye’s video sales force will be selling cassettes of movies like The Stud and concerts by Elvis and the Beatles. You can now walk into a record shop and buy an hour-long Boney M concert for £37.75 [about £150 in today’s prices, allowing for inflation – Ed]. Before you leave the record shop you can, thanks to Film-a-Disc, watch videos instead of just listening to records. Gone will be the days when you nervously ask the shop assistant to play you a track before you buy the album. Already you enlist the help of sophisticated equipment and watch the artists performing, and equipment for reproducing sound and pictures on video disc is getting cheaper and simpler all the time.

Within 12 months, video disc equipment should be available in this country and some record companies are currently releasing albums on video cassettes while they are waiting for the market to catch up with technology. If you have a video cassette system you can buy Chrysalis Records video cassette of Blondies’ Eat to the Beat album and watch the delectable Debbie Harry singing the 12 tracks on your television. It is in the shops now and it costs £29.95 [£120], but at that price is anybody buying it? Chrysalis’ marketing manager Phil Cokell says that it is doing very well and that his company are planning several more video albums this year.

“With a highly visual act like Blondie, we’re convinced that there is a market for video,” he says, and his company’s huge investment shows they are confident they know which way the winds of change are blowing. The Blondie tape cost 150,000 dollars to film but as Chrysalis are leading the video field, they hope to attract new acts with visual appeal. Eat to the Beat was filmed by Jon Roseman Productions, a leading video company. Appropriately enough the success of the Buggles record was greatly helped by the Roseman-made video promotions film which was shown on television pop shows.

VIDEO promotional films are becoming more and more important in the pop business and although they can cost anything between £6,000 and £20,000 [£24,000 and £80,000] each, the impact on sales is astonishing. I Don’t Like Mondays, Video Killed the Radio Star and Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall Part 2 were all number ones which would not have been half as successful without their promotional films. It is also worth remembering that the biggest selling U.K. single of all time (more than two million sold in Great Britain alone) benefited enormously from its video. That was Wings’ Mull of Kintyre; the video version of which featured those shots of Paul McCartney and his bag-pipers striding through the heather.

By the end of this decade, many predict, most homes will rent or own video disc and video cassette equipment. You will be able to play computer games, teach yourself to do almost anything, run movies and watch your favourite recording star perform on the screen.

But what about our radio stars? Already D.J.s are appearing on the videos shown in record shops courtesy of Film-a-Disc Ltd. and with Wrigley’s Chewing Gum sponsoring a record last month almost anything could happen in the future.

In the good old days, disc jockeys merely had to be able to talk well and work the equipment, or “drive the desk” as they say in radio circles. Only people with speech impediments were ruled out and many a deep sexy voice was owned by a 5ft. tall, ugly individual with dandruff. Nowadays you have to look the part as well as sound the part because, apart from video and television opportunities, D.J.s are promoted like brands of washing powder.

But if you are not as good-looking as Noel Edmonds, don’t despair. Looking the part doesn’t mean you have to be extremely handsome. Film stars like Lee Marvin and Gene Hackman are not good-looking in the conventional sense and if you want to make it as a disc jockey in the 1980s you will simply have to project a personality that people can identify with in some way or other.

By the middle of the decade, there could be a lot less music on the radio, a booming video disc industry and records that have their own commercial breaks. You just might be able to buy a video album by a top act with links by a famous D.J. and advertisements in between some of the tracks. Every album could become a mini television show.

Pop concerts have become visual events in recent years with top groups using lasers and expensive, special effects. The future will see even more visually-orientated musical acts, an ever increasing use of video in education as well as entertainment and a full-scale revolution in the film and television industries. As far as pop music is concerned, the brave new world pioneered by theatrical artists like David Bowie, Genesis and Kate Bush will soon be here but, ironically, most of the action will probably take place on television screens via videos and not in theatres through live concerts.

But back to radio. Video will not kill the radio star but every D.J. will have to become more versatile and, indeed, more visible. The fast-talking idiot who says nothing for so long in between records will soon be as extinct as the wind-up gramophone. Several radio D.J.s already work as continuity men on their local ITV stations. Before too long the faces behind the voices on the radio could also be seen on video in local shops, hospitals and homes.
hearing their employees referred to as D.J.s Many radio bosses do not take kindly to these days. The personable young man with a good education and a background in hospital radio is becoming a presenter, not a D.J. One day he might be interviewing Margaret Thatcher, the next hosting a phone-in on unemployment and the next introducing the latest Abba album.

But, as the decade progresses, what will happen to Kenny Everett, the man who is God’s gift to video? Well, he will probably be entertaining billions through his own system of inter-stellar, communication satellites. He is already enlisting the help of the intrepid Captain Kremmen and our two cuddly heroes plan to conquer the galaxy by next Tuesday. Video might well kill the old-style radio star but it looks like making an intergalactic celebrity of Kenny Everett.

The post Why video disc jockeys need to change horses appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.

Villains cross the street or swing a pick-axe handle when they run into Regan and Carter of The Sweeney, which returns for a new series this week. But off-screen, John Thaw and Dennis Waterman, who play the tough Flying Squad colleagues, are greeted by their fans like old friends

THE BACK STREETS of Baron’s Court in London could hardly be described as a tourist attraction. Even on a sullen Monday morn- ing, you’d have to be charitable to pick out the area’s redeeming features. Milk bottles line the steps of faded terraces, and “Abandon hope all ye who enter here” is daubed aggressively on a peeling front door. The streets around here wake up slowly and painfully. Only the activity outside number 11 has brought a dishevelled couple to an upstairs window to see what’s going on.

A large television company truck squats in the street, and several early- morning strollers are dragging dogs slowly past the house.

“What you doin’, mate?” one of them asks a cameraman.

“Rentokil,” he says, straightfaced. “We’re doing a film on urban wildlife.”

But it’s more likely to be a villain who crawls out of the woodwork once the cameras start to roll – the villain The Sweeney are here to put the finger on. They’re back for a new series.

The house is just one of the locations in “alternative” London which gives the series an air of seedy authenticity.

On the doorstep, the ritual lighting of cigarettes precedes a brief discussion on the next shot between the director, John Thaw, and Dennis Waterman. Lights flood the inside of the house; people, sound-equipment and a haze of cigarette smoke fill the narrow hall. And Regan and Carter proceed to feel the collar of another “blagger.”

Waterman and Thaw finally finish the scene and emerge into the street. It’s now past opening time. “There must be a pub round here somewhere,” insists Waterman. So they set off to “suss out” the area.

“When we walk in,” says Waterman, “someone will say, ‘Ello, The Sweeney’s in’.”

“Ello,” says a boiler-suited Guinness drinker as they walk into the pub, “backs to the wall, lads, it’s The Sweeney.”

Waterman grins. “We never have any trouble in pubs. Perhaps it’s because neither of us is a muscle man – they know they won’t get much pleasure out of hitting us. What I like is that we’re always called John and Dennis, never Regan and Carter.”

Thaw has barely got his vodka to his lips when a character unhooks himself from a bar-stool and approaches. Is he a “snout”?

“I just wanted to meet you, John,” he says, “and to say I think the show’s great.”

Thaw shakes his hand. “It’s nice of you to come over, mate. Thank you. Like a drink?” Regan would probably have pinned him up against the wall.

We discuss the heavy schedule they keep – Dennis Waterman talks about his dual career as singer and actor, and John Thaw explains the difficulties of being married to a successful actress. His wife, Sheila Hancock, is starring in the musical Annie, and he is feeling tired after a night out celebrating yet another acting award. “When Sheila’s working in the evening, and I’m filming all day, we don’t see much of each other,” he says, “and that can’t be good. I couldn’t play the chauvinist and insist she stay at home. Regan might try it, but if I was like him, I wouldn’t be married to Sheila; she wouldn’t have had me.”

Waterman makes derogatory comments about Thaw’s desirability as a husband, and one-line jokes whizz back and forth.

Waterman signs autographs on the way to the bar. “He’s just learned to do joined-up writing,” says Thaw. “Dennis and I get on very well and I think that comes across. You can’t define it. You just know Regan and Carter are mates.”

They see themselves as “part of a matey team, where everybody works for everybody else”, and believe that is a major factor in the series’ success. They actually enjoy getting up at dawn to go to work. “That has to be the clincher,” says Thaw.

We leave the pub and on the way back to the scene of the fictional crime, Waterman shadow-boxes a lamp-post and explains why The Sweeney fights can look heavy.

“The fights can be dangerous if the other guy doesn’t know the routine. I can move a bit because I’ve done some boxing.” (His brother, Peter, is a former British and European professional champion). “But the good fights are usually with minor villains, played by stunt-men who know exactly what they’re doing.”

Later in the week, the unit will be filming a car chase.

“People think the car chases are speeded up,” says Waterman, “but nothing is. In four years, there have been only two occasions when the driver has said, ‘I don’t trust this, I don’t want to do this with John and Dennis in the car’.”

Their driver, Frank Henson, a man who has been known to catapult a car through a plate-glass window, park it neatly and then stroll back to demand “a fry-up with all the works”, was at the wheel during a car stunt they filmed in Wandsworth one Sunday morning.

By the time the director was ready for action, an audience had gathered. “Listen,” an assistant shouted through a megaphone, “we’ve only got one take. I don’t want a load of ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ and definitely no applause!”

You could never accuse The Sweeney of playing to the crowd.

The post We’re no bright-eyed super heroes – we’re The Sweeney appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.

One of ITV’s best-known and most popular networked series for children, Magpie (Thames), has now been running for more than nine years. The programme’s informative magazine format allows for the coverage of a wide range of diverse topics, the boundaries of which are stretched even further by extensive use of outside broadcasts. But the most notable feature about Magpie is that unlike most television programmes – which, being steeped in the sophisticated technicalities of modern television, are often pre-recorded – it is still transmitted live from its studios in Teddington.

Tim Jones, Mogpie’s producer, reflects that: ‘Back in the good old days of black and white when to edit you needed a pair of scissors and a secret fluid, which I never knew the name of, the one thing all studio or outside broadcast based programmes had in common was that they were live and the viewers saw everything, including all the fluffs.’ Today, however, no TV station exists without its sophisticated video-tape operation and few programmes are, in fact, planned to be live.

Not so with Magpie. Twice a week, every week, for nine months of the year, the red light outside Studio 3 at Teddington means ‘On Air’. Of course, the whole programme isn’t live – recorded studio and outside broadcast inserts and film are used, but the presentation is live and, quite often, the whole programme has no recorded material at all.

Magpie consumes 42 hours of original material each year so, since it started on the ITV network in 1968, it has gobbled up over 350 hours of original thought. Being a programme for children there is no way of getting away with ‘making do’. Children are the most discerning of viewers, and maintaining the high standard of the series demands the involvement of many dedicated and specialised production team members.

Magpie is first and foremost an entertainment and the programmes always aim to be as lively as possible. However, most items are designed to provoke more than just a passive response and where possible children are stimulated into doing things for themselves. For example, cookery has become a very popular subject and the programme has recently taken an interest in the local fare prepared in different parts of the country.

There is also scope for dealing with current topics of interest in the news and Magpie has been able to relate to children the significance of such national crises as the 1976 drought or the deteriorating economic situation.

The presenters, Jenny Hanley, Mick Robertson and Tommy Boyd, get very involved in the studio activities and they also regularly travel with film crews to locations of special interest to the programme’s networked audience. Apart from the summer trip each year, which provides film inserts for a number of editions of the programme, the team also manage to fit in other occasional visits abroad and have already explored such countries as Egypt, USA and Kenya. These films show young viewers cultures and ways of life different to their own and give them a chance to see places they may themselves be fortunate enough to visit one day.

Competitions always create a favourable response from Magpie viewers, but here again they are designed to stimulate the child and to increase his interest, knowledge and general awareness. A road safety poster painting competition, organised in collaboration with the Department of Environment, not only encouraged thousands of children to be creative with a paint brush but also made them think about the whole question of road safety. Magpie then took things one stage further and, instead of offering a prize of material value, invited the winners to see their entries pass through all the processes of printing. Naturally, the camera team were there to record the event and a further film was made to show the printed posters being hung on hoarding sites all over Britain.

Of course, linking all these items together with the live presentation from the studio does present problems. But, as producer Tim Jones points out, ‘when that “On Air” light goes on the pulse moves a little faster and one is that much sharper’.

The post Live from studio 3 appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.

Perusing Tuesday’s TV listings in that day’s paper I noticed that Sooty had moved over to ITV and a new magazine show ‘Magpie’ was on at 5.10. There had been something billed earlier that afternoon as Opening Of Thames but that meant nothing to me. The set warmed up during the ad break and then a very unfamiliar face appeared in the announcer’s chair (I was later to discover this was Sheila Kennedy) in front of a very different backdrop. It was when she said something along the lines of “Now we start today’s children’s programmes on Thames…” that it sunk in; change had come, it was all becoming a little exciting!

I hadn’t been completely unprepared for this, some months back my parents had mentioned something they’d read in the paper that ITV in London was changing and the name ‘Thames TV’ came up. I just assumed it was to be a straight name change, Redvers Kyle, Muriel Young, Jon Kelly and Laurie West would all still be there with a ‘Thames TV’ logo pinned on the front and back of the programmes instead of ‘Rediffusion’. But seeing Sheila Kennedy followed by the plain text version of the FROM THAMES ident playing into The Sooty Show it became clear that it had really happened and it was all going to be very different, subsequently I sat through ‘Sooty’ anticipating more Thames graphics and announcements at the end of the programme. I mention ‘graphics’ but up to this point it was just down to plain text, no station symbol at the start or end of the programmes, just a simple FROM THAMES.

Magpie was up next which immediately presented itself as an ITV version of ‘Blue Peter’ and, as often noted, a tad more hip and trendy, although I also recognised it as a near replacement for Rediffusion’s Come Here Often which, in retrospect I feel was the better show.

That first edition was not without excitement though, a filmed report of a balloon flight taken by Susan Stranks included footage of the balloon bursting into flames not long after landing and Susan had safely stepped away. Later in the show fellow presenter Tony Bastable introduced us to the concept of the various Magpie badges, inviting viewers to collect the complete set of eleven (I still cherish my ‘Four For A Boy’ badge to this day), while Pete Brady took us on a pre-filmed helicopter trip along the Thames around Teddington Lock and the weir, complete with an aerial view of the studio buildings. Also appearing in that first edition was the start of a short run of Captain Fantastic lifted straight from Rediffusion’s Do Not Adjust Your Set which seemed a bit weird really and at odds with the rest of the show.

Children’s programmes over, another commercial break and it’s ITN News time with, for the first time for me anyway, a sighting of the Thames clock, now with Philip Elsmore signing on as our evening announcer. The clock doubled as a calendar, I’m sure I’d seen something similar hanging on the wall in our local branch of Barclay’s Bank. Main story on the news was the arrival of Thames Television during which I noticed the skyline ident being played. Now that looked really impressive and I couldn’t help but wonder why they didn’t use that in front of the programmes.

The new regional news programme Today held very little interest for me as a nine-year-old and anyway, it was a summer evening so I was back outside playing with my mates until later in the evening when, along with the rest of my family I settled down to enjoy Tommy Cooper’s King Size show. During the commercial break the screen went blank cutting an advert part way through.

Around ten seconds later another commercial started playing but this was also faded abruptly as the screen went blank again and stayed that way, prompting my father to grumble about the poor organisation of this ‘young upstart of a company’. Little did he know! The apology card that followed at least went some way to explain. That was the last I would see of our new TV station that day, nine o’clock was bedtime for me and my siblings, after which I assumed my parents would be switching to BBC-1 for their further televisual entertainment.

The following morning I just had to reassure myself that, after the previous night’s fiasco Thames would still be there. As my little sister finished watching Play School on BBC-2 I quietly turned the dial to Channel 9 where I was greeted by the familiar Test Card D with the wording ‘ITA Thames Television London Weekend Television’ which somewhat confused me; Thames was London’s WEEKDAY television, how could they have got that one wrong?

After Rediffusion’s solid and paternal method of presentation it took a little while to get used to the slightly more ‘showbiz’ and lightweight approach from Thames. At nine years old I was totally unaware that we were really watching ABC in different clothes and I really had no idea as to why things had changed in the first place.

A few days into the new regime though it did occur to me to check out the other station that we could pick up in Crawley from a place called Chillerton Down. Sure enough, there on Channel 11 was Southern Television, dependable as ever and totally unaffected by what had been going on in London, armed with the reassurance that they would NEVER go away…

The post A new service for London appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.

BROADCASTING licences are reviewed every six years by the Independent Television Authority. The major shake-up, which comes into effect today, 13 years after the start of ITV, is a severe warning to the various independent companies that there is no room for complacency.

The very fact that the oldest independent company of them all, Rediffusion, has not retained complete control of London’s weekday programmes is an indication that licences will not automatically be renewed.

Today, it has merged with ABC TV, and as from now your programmes from Monday to Thursday [sic] inclusive are coming to you by courtesy of Thames Television

At a Mansion House luncheon, the service was launched in the presence of figures prominent in London’s Government and business, in London’s music, art and sport, and in the nation’s Press and Parliament which reflect the life and power of the capital.

Speakers included the Lord Mayor, Lord Aylestone, chairman of the ITA, Sir Philip Waster [sic – Warter], chairman, and Howard Thomas, managing director of Thames Television.

Eamonn Andrews introduces recorded highlights of the luncheon at 11.30 tonight. Andrew Gardner describes the scene and talks to some of the distinguished guests present at the Mansion House.

At the weekend – Friday [sic] through to Sunday – programmes will be controlled by the London Television Consortium (London Weekend). This is the company that attracted Michael Peacock away from the BBC and has David Frost as one of its star men.

Then, as in the past programmes made by regional companies will be fed into the schedule for the London area.

Coronation Street, for instance, will continue from Granada, as will University Challenge, What the Papers Say and other well established programmes.

But there will be additional material from the north – from Yorkshire Television. For the territory up there has been divided down the Pennines: Granada hold the rights for the county of the red rose, Yorkshire Television – the company that attracted Alan Whicker away from the BBC – for the county of the white.

It was 18 months ago that Lord Hill, then chairman of the ITA, announced plans to change the face of ITV.

The richest and most sought after prize was London. The contract winners were announced first over a year ago.

Lord Hill said of the London weekday contract “With our principle of programme quality in mind, we felt that Independent Television would gain benefit if the abilities of ABC and Rediffusion were to combine in providing the weekday service. The combination of these two companies seemed to ihe Authority to offer the possibility of a company of real excellence.”

Unlike Thames Television, there will be no opening ceremony for London Weekend Television. And unlike other companies there will be no station symbol – just the name.

London Weekend Television is backed by an impressive line-up of television professionals: men such as Aldan Crawley, Michael Peacock and David Frost.

Of this company Lord Hill said: “Of the applicants for the weekend, the London Consortium impressed us most, particularly because of its creative talent.”

At a recent luncheon in London, managing director, Michael Peacock promised: “There will be a lot of charges in your weekend viewing. New shows, new faces and new times to remember”

Well, what is in store for the viewer?

Thames Television

DRAMA

Frontier: New adventure series set in the North West Frontier when the British Army kept the peace in the Asian equivalent of the Wild West.

90-Minute Dramas: Three plays adapted by William Marchant from short stories by Noel Coward. Already in production, Star Quality, starring Glynis Johns and Robert Hardy, to be followed by Bon Voyage and The Kindness of Mrs Radcliffe. A new adaptation of Mary Shelley’s famous Frankenstein by Robert Muller and an adaptation of Uncle Silas the ghost story by Sheridan Le Fanuare planned.

Premiere: Live, one hour television dramas will be presented through October with top directors, distinguished casts and writers.

The Sex Game: Romantic 60-minute plays. Trials and tribulations of lovers who ultimately merge to live happily ever after.

The Mind of Mr. J. G. Reeder. Adaptations of Edgar Wallace stones starring Hugh Burden and Willoughby Goddard.

CHILDREN

The Tyrant King: A London adventure for children. The first modern colour film TV serial made in Britain for children.

The Queen Street Gang: A new children’s adventure series in which a professor is captured by criminals and rescued by the Queen Street Boys, a highly organised gang, led by his own son.

Once Upon A Time: A series of 15-minute programmes in which celebrities will tell classic or original stories to a children’s audience.

The Sooty Show: Harry Corbett, Sooty, Sweep and the rest of the gang in a children’s entertainment series recorded at The May Fair Theatre.

Pinky & Perky: A series of 15-minute shows featuring the famous puppets Pinky and Perky and their colleagues.

COMEDY

Best of Enemies: Situation comedy written by Vince Powell and Harry Driver about two members of Parliament: a young Labour newcomer to the House of Commons and a wily old Tory. Tim Barrett and Robert Coote star.

Father, Dear Father: Patrick Cargill stars as the divorced father of two very highly nubile mini-skirted teenage daughters with Sally Bazely as his literary agent and good friend.

Comedy Tonight: A season of six new comedy plays written by top authors including Ronald Wolfe and Ronald Chesney, Vince Powell and Harry Driver and Dave Freeman.

Sid James: A new series, as yet untitled, written by Vince Powell and Harry Driver, starring Sid James.

Horne-a-Plenty: Comedy-Revue starring Kenneth Horne assisted by Sheila Steafel and Kenneth’s friends, which might well bear an amazing resemblance to the radio series Round the Horne.

SPECIALS

Already announced are two one hour specials starring Tommy Cooper; The Max Bygraves Show; Liberace in London; An Evening with Jack Benny, in which comedian Jack Benny conducts and stars with the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall; a comedy concert with Victor Borge; The Frankie Howerd Show and, of course, The Goons, a half-hour radio show for television starring Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe.

Hughie Green’s Opportunity Knocks! returns for a new season and The Eamonn Andrews Show takes a completely new look when it comes from the May Fair Theatre in the heart of the West End.

FEATURES

Today: A live, dally topical entertainment and information show about people and places in and around London with Eamonn Andrews.

Robert Kee Reports: A series of monthly 45-minute documentaries on important issues of the day.

Applause! Applause! A series of six documentary programmes on great stars of variety and the music hall including Grade Fields, Max Miller, George Robey, Sid Fields, George Formby and Lucan McShane.

Magpie: A weekly magazine programme for children, Forty minutes of information and entertainment plus the serial story of Captain Fantastic.

ADULT EDUCATION

Ballet For All: A series of six half-hour programmes to help bring appreciation of this unique art to a wider audience.

So You’re Going on Holiday: An in-depth appreciation of the countries of Europe – the historical and cultural background behind the holiday facade.

The Tools of Cookery: A new series in which top TV cook Philip Harben demonstrates the importance of using the right tools for the job in the kitchen, from knives and saucepans to ovens and mixers.

World of Crime: Eight new programmes which examine specific cases of the victims of crime in Britain and North America.

RELIGION

A new ten-minute series entitled Last Programme – this will be shown seven nights a week, London Weekend Television will show the series on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

THE AVENGERS

A new series starring Patrick Macnee and introducing Linda Thomson [sic – Thorson] as John Steed’s new partner, Tara King.

Among the successful programmes which will carry on in the new schedules are This Week, Armchair Theatre, Hullaballoo, Callan, The Eamonn Andrews Show, Sexton Blake, Opportunity Knocks!, and Public Eye.

So far as London Weekend Television is concerned plays return to Sunday night; David Frost has three shows; and there is an abundance of comedy to suit all the family. Concerts by Leonard Bernstein, Yehudi Menuhin and Benny Goodman are planned. So are productions of the Beggar’s Opera and Benjamin Britten’s The Golden Vanity.

Saturday specials are planned to broaden the range of cultural programmes. And sports fans are catered for with Sports Arena on Fridays and World of Sport on Saturdays.

All we have to do is wait and see.

The post The new look appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.

“The Managing Director, Bryan Cowgill, accepted a plan put to him by the Director of Production, Richard Dunn. It was a plan that proposed the unthinkable; the management would operate the station.”

In late 1984, Thames Television’s output was affected by two industrial disputes. The first occasion lasted one week and led to blue screens throughout London and the South East; the second occurrence saw Thames management respond with their own makeshift service.

Monday 27 August 1984

On Bank Holiday Monday (for most of the UK), an ongoing and lengthy dispute concerning new working arrangements spilled out into industrial action. As outlined in Independent Television in Britain, Volume 5: ITV and IBA 1981-82 – The Old Relationship Changes:

The heart of any television station is its Central Transmission Facility (CTF), which presents and transmits the programmes and, in commercial television, the revenue-earning advertisements. For historical reasons, up until this time Thames CTF staff had been self-rostering. The unions wanted thirty-two staff, all to be paid at six times the normal hourly rate (the industry term for this was ‘golden hours’) to run a night-time service, an expansion of operation favoured by the IBA.

The management developed a roster by which the night service could be run by six people on time-and-a-half rates. [Richard] Dunn (Director of Production) received support from [Bryan] Cowgill (Managing Director) and the Board when he sought to impose the new roster. ¹

Meetings between Thames management and the Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians (ACTT) – from December through to July – culminated in management pressing ahead with its plans to implement the new rosters for seventy staff in the CTF.

Talks at the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS) followed in August; then, on the 22nd, ACTT members voted to support the men in the CTF unit and against further ACAS discussions.²

Monday 27 saw the implementation of the new arrangements, with the likelihood of a dispute highlighted in the morning newspapers. “ITV companies were yesterday making emergency arrangements to avoid a television blackout today”³, noted the Glasgow Herald whilst the Newcastle Journal explained the numbers involved:

The 70 men involved in the dispute earn between £26,000 and £29,000 a year for a basic six-day fortnight of 74 hours.

The new rosters would mean a nine-day fortnight and would cut between £2000 and £7000 from overtime payments to the technicians.

Thames says the change is aimed at saving £200,000 a year in overtime payments which it has to pay because of local agreements, even though the technicians do not actually work much of the overtime.

The technicians have been told to start working the new rosters from 8am today, but they are likely to ignore the instruction and continue working the old system.

If they do, they will be suspended and their department, central technical facilities, will stop putting out programmes.⁴

Monday morning came and as predicted, one technician was suspended for failing to observe the new rotas; his colleagues then walked out in protest. 6 The technicians subsequently received the backing of their colleagues, though the union meeting was attended by fewer than 200 of the 550 ACTT members at Thames’ Euston studios.⁵

MD Bryan Cowgill remained bullish: “We do not require thirty men on duty in our central transmission area on overtime late at night when the operation requirements of the company can be met most of the time by ten men working normal rostered time.”⁶

At 9.25am, following the conclusion of TV-am’s output, viewers served by Thames saw this caption which remained in place throughout the day.

For the rest of the network, the dispute had a sizeable effect with as much as nine-and-a-half hours of output affected.⁷ Some regions were immediately hit by the absence of Sesame Street at 9.25am,⁸ before the whole network lost its scheduled afternoon and most of its evening output:

• 12.30pm Bank Holiday Sport featuring golf and racing from Epsom and Newcastle (all regions) until 5.05pm
• 8pm The Benny Hill Show (all regions)
• 9.15pm Film: The Long Good Friday (all regions)
• 11.20pm Elton John in Central Park (except HTV Wales & West)

Tyne Tees viewers did receive the planned horse racing coverage from Newcastle, but otherwise makeshift schedules with recorded sport and other material were the order of the day. Following the racing, Tyne Tees aired American drama CHiPs at 4pm; The Benny Hill Show was replaced with Quincy before John Wayne’s western The Train Robbers at 9.15pm. Elton John’s performance was substituted with Tom Jones in concert at Knott’s Berry Farm, California from 11pm; a That’s Hollywood profile of Gregory Peck closed proceedings.

STV’s makeshift afternoon service began with a repeated edition of the documentary series Weir’s Way followed by local golf highlights, the 1955 film Doctor at Sea, cartoon fun with Snuffy Smith and Barney Google, CHiPs and the animated adventures of the Harlem Globetrotters. The Scottish Fiddle Orchestra in concert and James Coburn spy caper Our Man Flint replaced the bulk of the evening’s scheduled output.

From 8pm, Yorkshire viewers received a locally-produced comedy double bill of In Loving Memory and Duty Free before the 1968 Michael Caine drama Deadfall stood in as the evening film and Tina Turner – in a Canadian concert performance from 1982 – substituted for Elton John.

Meanwhile, Grampian replaced Benny Hill with an instalment of Lee Majors’ adventure series The Fall Guy. Following a brief musical interlude from Rod Argent, the evening’s big movie premiere was replaced with Peter Nichols’ 1973 satirical feature The National Health starring Lynn Redgrave and Jim Dale; eagle-eyed viewers would have noted the presence of Bob Hoskins – star of the evening’s scheduled film – in the cast. Wishbone Ash Live in Concert at The Marquee Club, produced by Trilion Pictures the prior year, completed the evening.

On Tuesday, the dispute continued to affect sports coverage from Epsom, this time as part of Channel 4 Racing;⁹ though ITV disruption was minimal, with only a repeated edition of Rainbow at 12.10pm absent from network schedules. HTV’s delayed screening of the Elton John concert at 11.30pm was likewise blacked.

Meanwhile, London’s screens – TV-am aside – were once again devoid of ITV output. Thames management offered to go to arbitration to resolve the dispute; meanwhile, at midday,¹⁰ ACTT members in Euston Road voted 158 to 147 to return to work. However, the union’s shop stewards decided that the margin of victory was too narrow; instead, a strike committee was assembled – half the membership formed of representatives from the seventy members within the CTF – with a further meeting scheduled for Thursday.¹¹

Further disruption occurred on Wednesday with Rod, Jane & Freddy (12noon & 4pm) and a repeated edition of The Sooty Show (4.20pm) displaced; Tyne Tees viewers received World Famous Fairy Tales and Flintstone Frolics respectively, whilst STV ran Alfie Atkins before Sooty was inexplicably replaced with teenage comedy import Joanie Loves Chachi. Later, in place of the documentary Crime Inc (9pm), Tyne Tees screened The Streets of San Francisco whilst STV & Grampian also swapped fact for fiction with The Sweeney.

Thursday’s ACTT meeting saw staff vote overwhelmingly to continue their action until at least Monday, whilst management considered proposals put forward by the strike committee;¹² subsequently, ACAS talks continued into the early hours of Friday.¹³ That evening’s scheduled TV movie – the WWII drama The Scarlet and The Black – at 7pm was a further casualty of the dispute. Grampian aired the feature-length musical South Pacific whilst STV viewers saw Steve McQueen in the western Nevada Smith.

Britain’s fourth channel was also experiencing disruption. On Monday, the signal for London viewers – normally sent via Thames before reaching viewers’ homes – was rerouted directly to transmitters; this meant that Channel 4 transmissions in the capital were airing without commercials.¹⁴ The situation was now escalating:

“Channel 4 was going out…in [the] Central, Border, Grampian, Ulster and Scottish areas…without any advertising.

“The commercials blackout – which will lose the companies advertising revenue – follows a response from technicians to black Channel 4 after attempts to get the network off screens in the Thames area failed.

“Although the Independent Broadcasting Authority can route the Channel 4 signal direct to transmitters without passing through the companies, only the individual companies can insert the advertisements appropriate to their areas. Because the technicians’ union, the ACTT, could not get Channel 4 stopped in the Thames area, it asked other companies to blackout the commercial breaks.” – Aberdeen Evening Express, 31 Aug 1984

Friday’s programme changes were limited to daytime output with a repeat of Chorlton & The Wheelies (12noon) and a new Rainbow (12.10pm & 4pm) displaced; at 4pm, Tyne Tees deployed European Folktales whilst STV screened a film on Canadian wildlife. As usual, LWT – unaffected by the dispute – took to the air at 5.15pm.

Following twenty hours of talks over the weekend, programmes on Thames resumed at 1pm on Monday 3 September after ACTT technicians voted 370 to 35 to accept a deal between management and the union. The settlement allowed the company flexibility over rostering whilst agreeing to a reduction in working hours.¹⁵ Further talks relating to the future integration of video, telecine and the master control areas of the CTF would follow.¹⁶

With thanks to Ferguson Videostar

With thanks to Ferguson Videostar

Wednesday 17 October 1984

“Threat to ITV Tonight” was the Evening Standard headline, following a dispute involving sixty-two film editors and their proposed use of lightweight videotape cameras. Thames management had offered the staff a 20% pay increase in two stages, an initial 13% followed by a further 7% upon implementation of the new technology; union members were asking for 30% (26% then 4%).¹⁷ ACTT shop steward Peter Bould emphasised that the editors, “were naturally seeking some parity in earnings” with other technicians ¹⁸ and noted that the stumbling block in reaching a settlement was agreement on a date for the payment of increases for handling the new equipment.¹⁹

The union wants the high settlement in return for operating new technology, but Thames management pointed out that the men already earn £13,000 – £20,000 [£43,000 – £66,500 in 2019, allowing for inflation] and have just received a 10 per cent bonus under the company’s profit-sharing scheme.

The pay dispute has run for 18 months and programmes were disrupted at the beginning of the month because of an unofficial work to rule.

Programmes affected were Thames News, the current affairs series TV Eye and a major show business special featuring Jim Davidson entertaining troops in the Falklands.

A Thames spokesman said this afternoon: “We have heard nothing official from the union yet but we are not hopeful about tonight’s programmes. We will not know until 6pm what is happening. We do not plan to change our minds.”

“It is most upsetting because we feel that 20 per cent is a more than reasonable offer.”

Tonight’s blackout threat came after the 550 members of the ACTT shop at Thames Television decided at a mass meeting to support the 62 film editors. – Evening Standard, 17th Oct 1984

ACTT members at Euston Road began industrial action – having given management five hours’ notice²⁰ – at 7.26pm.²¹

London’s ITV screens were then filled by the already familiar apology caption whilst other regions continued with Coronation Street before deploying their own alternative output in lieu of the scheduled evening programmes, all due to emanate from Thames:

• 8pm New Series: This Is Your Life
• 8.30pm New Series: Mike Yarwood In Persons
• 9pm Minder (New Episode: ‘The Long Ride Back To Scratchwood’)
• 10.30pm Midweek Sport Special featuring England vs Finland from Wembley (except STV & Grampian)

Viewers of Grampian saw an episode of the ITC action series The Adventurer at 8pm followed by Happy Days – its first of several outings over the coming few days – with The Streets of San Francisco replacing Arthur Daley.

The dispute continued the following day. Unlike the initial strike during August, this blackout also affected ITV Schools broadcasts; on these occasions, no substitute programming was provided with only a simple apology caption and music airing in place of the scheduled Thames output. The first such broadcasts to be affected were Middle English, Seeing and Doing and Craft, Design and Technology. Later on Thursday, Sarah Kennedy’s discussion show Daytime at 2.30pm, American drama Hotel (networked to some areas at 8.30pm) and TV Eye (9.30pm) were all absent from the various ITV regions – the latter interruption prompting a further appearance by Fonzie on Grampian’s screens.

On Friday, only Middle English and the traditional double screening of Rainbow at 12.10pm and 4pm were absent from the network; as usual, LWT resumed its broadcasts at 5.15pm.

At this stage, Thames staff at Teddington continued to work as normal;²² meanwhile, the Daily Mail noted a plan by Thames management to get the station back on the air:

Senior executives said that if the strike was not settled by Monday, management engineers would screen programmes.

Such a move, bypassing the company’s 550 [Euston] technicians, could lead to a complete ITV shutdown by the technicians’ union ACTT. But there is no doubting the seriousness of the Thames plan, which was given a dummy run yesterday.

The programmes would be old ones – Minder repeats, for example, rather than current Minder episodes. But they would keep advertisers happy and probably many viewers as well in the 11 million homes in the Thames TV area.

A senior Thames source said: “The repercussions of this would be enormous because [the] ACTT might pull everyone out.”

“But we are very, very angry – not with the pay claim, but with the way the strike was called on Wednesday. In blatant defiance of the disputes procedure, the Euston shop gave only five hours’ notice of industrial action.”²³

Planning for the makeshift service was already at an advanced stage:

Fred Atkinson, a wise and able engineer, who was in charge of operations at both the transmission centre at Euston Road and the outside broadcast centre at Hanworth and was Dunn’s right-hand man, worked out a roster of managers to run the station. These included a backbone of managers of the key transmission, videotape and telecine (film transmissions) areas. But the remainder of the forty-five or so people necessary to keep the station on the air were hastily trained finance, personnel and other members of the non-broadcast aspects of management. Dunn proposed the plan to Cowgill, who backed it. Fred Atkinson on the operations side and Barrie Sales on the programme schedule side were to implement it. – Independent Television in Britain: Volume 5, p159

Following nineteen hours of discussions over the weekend, talks broke down in the early hours of Monday morning, 22nd October; the management service was then primed for launch that evening.

Thames TV is going back on the air tonight – with programmes put out by management in defiance of striking technicians.

Thames managing director Mr Bryan Cowgill said the strike was costing the company £3 ½ million a week in lost advertising revenue.

He promised to continue the emergency service “for as long as it takes”.

The technicians’ union, ACTT, attacked the decision to mount what it called a “pirate” service and warned that serious disruption could hit programmes throughout the ITV national network.

The union’s general secretary, Mr Alan Sapper, added, “The union states its total opposition to such a venture and commits its full resources to frustrating it.

“This move by management is totally unprecedented in the history of independent television’s industrial relations and seriously hinders any resolvement to the present dispute involving film editors.”

Mr Cowgill said the union had put a “double-barrel shotgun to our head and pulled the trigger.”

He went on, “I am not, and neither is my board, haunted by the prospect of a blank screen.

“It offends me and it spits on the public. I’m not prepared to sit around any longer.”

Mr Cowgill said there were still 1500 people working normally and Thames would continue to meet the £950,000 wages bill for as long as possible before considering further action. – Evening Standard, 22nd Oct 1984

Contrary to earlier press reports, Cowgill confirmed that the service would not only broadcast repeats but would contain some new material.

To avoid an escalation of the dispute, the service did not run programming from other ITV regions or from ITN; as before, Thames programmes remained off the air in other areas. Alan Sapper, General Secretary of the ACTT, explained the logistics to LBC:

At 6pm, the service – which had required the approval of the IBA²⁴ – went live.

Thames’ Monday evening schedule, as originally published, was:

• 6pm Thames News
• 6.25pm Help!
• 6.35pm Crossroads
• 7pm The Krypton Factor
• 7.30pm Coronation Street
• 8pm Tripper’s Day
• 8.30pm World In Action
• 9pm Quincy
• 10pm News At Ten f/b Thames News Headlines
• 10.30pm Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense
• 11.55pm The Bounder

…whilst the new makeshift schedule was thus:

• 6pm Carry on Laughing
• 6.25pm Help!
• 6.30pm Keep It In The Family
• 7pm Knight Rider
• 8pm Tripper’s Day*
• 8.30pm Fresh Fields
• 9pm Minder
• 10pm Quincy
• 11pm Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense
• 12.10am Night Thoughts

(Note: * indicates peak-time programmes scheduled in Thames’ originally published line-up)

With thanks to Ferguson Videostar

Initially, the replacement service contained no national or local news bulletins.

Outside London, The English Programme, Seeing and Doing and The French Programme were absent from ITV Schools. Then, Christopher Lillicrap’s Flicks – at 12noon & 4pm – Educating Marmalade at 4.40pm and Danger Mouse at 5pm were all displaced from Children’s ITV. Tyne Tees aired cartoons and Laurel & Hardy’s three-reel Chickens Come Home before deploying a clever replacement for the evening’s single affected programme; in place of Tripper’s Day at 8pm, Leonard Rossiter instead featured in the 1978 short film The Waterloo Bridge Handicap. Over on Channel 4, Thames’ daytime show A Plus 4 failed to appear in its regular 4pm slot; the programme remained off the air throughout the dispute.

The following day, Thames – having carried out a telephone survey of viewers – claimed that the emergency service had proven extremely popular;²⁵ subsequent BARB figures confirmed this with Minder – postponed from the prior Wednesday – having attracted 3.1m viewers in London.²⁶

With its entertainment-centric schedule free of the usual allowance of news and documentaries, the company claimed that advertising was 100% of what was normally expected.²⁷ Over the course of the dispute, Thames registered a 46% audience share, only 2% down from the prior year.²⁸

On Tuesday, ACTT staff at Teddington responded to the management’s actions by joining the strike;²⁹ this decision immediately affected programme production and threatened to disrupt the recording of a planned Eric Morecambe tribute at the London Palladium on Friday 9 Nov.³⁰ However, despite earlier suggestions, no national blackout of ITV – aside from the absence of Thames material – was to occur.³¹

The makeshift service for Tuesday began at 1.40pm – this would remain the opening time throughout the rest of the service – with a Danny Kaye film displaced from the previous day’s originally planned schedule.

Tuesday 23 October 1984

• 1.40pm Film: Up in Arms
• 3.30pm The Young Doctors
• 4pm The Wind in The Willows
• 5.30pm Botanic Man
• 6pm Diff’rent Strokes
• 6.25pm Help!
• 6.30pm Keep It In The Family
• 7pm Carry on Laughing
• 7.30pm Give Us a Clue*
• 8pm Des O’Connor Tonight*
• 9pm The Bill*
• 10pm Shelley
• 10.30pm Schindler (documentary, 1983)
• 11.50pm Night Thoughts

David Bellamy’s 1978 nature series and the American comedy Diff’rent Strokes would become permanent fixtures at 5.30pm and 6pm respectively; likewise, the Robert Gillespie sitcom Keep It In The Family at 6.30pm.

Along with networked programmes, also missing from Thames’ regular Tuesday schedule was current affairs staple Reporting London at 6.55pm. Fortuitously for the makeshift service, however, Euston Road was already due to provide almost the entire evening’s output across the network, allowing Thames to largely stay with their published peak-time schedule; following Give Us a Clue, guests Ted Rogers and Jill Gascoine appeared on Des O’Connor Tonight before the second episode of new police drama The Bill.

No schools programmes were affected on Tuesday. Later, Rainbow (12.10pm), Daytime (2.30pm) and CBTV (4.45pm) were all absent; for the latter, Granada substituted an edition of its 1982 space technology series The Final Frontier whilst Grampian aired the animated Flintstone Frolics.

That evening, the regions were further deprived of two-and-a-half hours of scheduled output. On TVS, Olivia Newton-John’s feature-length music video Twist of Fate replaced Give Us a Clue before the Sidney Poitier drama To Sir, With Love. Central viewers saw American sitcom Benson and 1966 western Alvarez Kelly.

Granada filled the entire evening’s gap with one film, WWII thriller The Eagle Has Landed, as did Tyne Tees with Nevada Smith. Network output returned to normal with News at Ten followed by an ITN/Central documentary on Afghanistan with Sandy Gall.

Wednesday 24 October 1984

• 1.40pm A Country Practice
• 2.30pm Mary Berry
• 3pm The Adventurer
• 3.30pm Sons and Daughters
• 4pm We’ll Tell You a Story
• 4.15pm Cockleshell Bay
• 4.30pm The Sooty Show
• 4.45pm Danger Mouse
• 5pm CBTV
• 5.30pm Botanic Man
• 6pm Diff’rent Strokes
• 6.25pm Help!
• 6.30pm Keep It In The Family
• 7pm Name That Tune*
• 7.30pm Morecambe & Wise
• 8pm Benny Hill
• 9pm The Sweeney
• 10pm Shelley
• 10.30pm Hill Street Blues
• 11.20pm Night Thoughts

Members of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) joined the strike on Wednesday,³² the same day that Thames began to stage makeshift news updates throughout its schedule, with bulletins at 1.40pm, 3.30pm, 6pm, 8pm and 10pm. The short updates were written and read by Director of Public Relations, Donald Cullimore, a former ITN political correspondent.³³ When Cullimore departed for New York on Thames business,³⁴ his place was taken by Ronald Allison, Thames Head of Sport and ex-BBC reporter.³⁵

The Peterborough column in the Daily Telegraph… found a pleasurable nostalgia in the fact that, since the autocue operators were on strike, the two men had reverted to the ‘head down with an occasional glance up to the camera’ newsreading technique of the fifties. The London Evening Standard was less supportive, believing, not entirely without justification, that a number of stories each night were culled from that paper’s early editions. – Independent Television in Britain: Volume 5, p160

Elsewhere, the ITV Schools schedule was once again affected, with Craft, Design and Technology and The English Programme missing. Later, Rod Jane & Freddy (12noon & 4pm) was similarly absent.

Once again, the evening’s planned network output was severely impacted. STV replaced Name That Tune at 7pm with a further outing for the Scottish Fiddle Orchestra, whilst TVS & Central turned to regular standby Happy Days; Granada viewers enjoyed the lively chaos of The Grumbleweeds Radio Show.

Following Coronation Street, films replaced the 8pm to 10pm Thames triple-bill – This Is Your Life, Mike Yarwood and Minder – in several regions: STV screened the Neil Simon comedy Barefoot In The Park whilst TVS aired Western prequel Butch & Sundance – The Early Days. Our Man Flint appeared on Granada whilst war drama Hanover Street was shown on Central.

With thanks to 2ombieboy’s VHS Vault

A proposal to resolve the dispute was sent by the ACTT to the Independent Television Companies Association;³⁶ meanwhile, the makeshift service continued apace. Thames’ Thursday schedule included some previously displaced programmes and a new series.

Thursday 25 October 1984

• 1.40pm Falcon Crest
• 2.30pm Mary Berry
• 3pm The Adventurer
• 3.30pm Sons and Daughters
• 4pm We’ll Tell You a Story
• 4.15pm Cockleshell Bay
• 4.30pm The Sooty Show
• 4.45pm Danger Mouse
• 5pm Challenge
• 5.30pm Botanic Man
• 6pm Diff’rent Strokes
• 6.25pm Help!
• 6.30pm Keep It In The Family
• 7pm Knight Rider
• 8pm New Series: Up The Elephant and Round The Castle*
• 8.30pm Hotel
• 9.30pm TV Eye
• 10pm Hill Street Blues
• 11.40pm Night Thoughts

Hotel – the episode ‘Intimate Strangers’ with guest Elizabeth Taylor – had originally been scheduled for the prior Thursday; likewise, TV Eye, the weekly current affairs programme whose report on the Ethiopian famine, entitled ‘Bitter Harvest’, was intended for broadcast throughout ITV. By this point in the dispute, all programme production at both Euston and Teddington – Euston Films was not affected by the dispute³⁷ – had halted entirely.³⁸ However, outside intervention and a unique networking arrangement ensured its transmission across the UK, as reported in The Guardian.

Striking Thames TV technicians will today go into the company’s Euston studios in London for the first time for a week after volunteering to work on a TV Eye programme on the Ethiopian famine, to be shown tonight.

The gesture by the technicians’ union the ACTT, was in response to an appeal from Oxfam and the Save The Children fund, “to show humanitarian support by allowing this powerful film to be shown on national television as a special case.” Both charities expect the programme to stimulate donations and other help.

A complicated formula had to be worked out to enable production and transmission work on TV Eye to be completed without either side losing face. The film department of the Euston studios, where 550 technicians are on strike, will complete production work free of charge, so that technically they will not have returned to work.

The results will be taken to the Teddington studios in West London, where over 300 technicians are out, for final processing and for production of two copies. One copy will be given to Thames management to transmit in their management-run emergency service from the Euston studio tonight.

The other will be given to ACTT members to transmit to the network of TV stations outside London from Teddington. This means that Thames management are not seen to restore even part of a service outside London, and the management do not have to allow ACTT members to transmit in the Euston studios while they are on unofficial strike.³⁹

Earlier, ITV Schools broadcasts of Middle English, Seeing and Doing and Craft, Design and Technology had all failed to appear. Later, a varied selection of repeats aired in place of Daytime at 2.30pm including Paint Along with Nancy (TVS), Laverne & Shirley (Central) and The Beverly Hillbillies (HTV). Elsewhere, TSW screened the 1982 film Yvonne Hudson – Sculptor whilst Granada viewers saw an edition of the RTE documentary series Hands (entitled ‘A Dublin Candlemaker’). Yorkshire broadcast an instalment of its locally-produced series Clegg’s People.

At 4.45pm Spooky – the Thames children’s drama – was substituted by TVS & Yorkshire for the ongoing adventures of The Smurfs. Central opted for an edition of Groovy Ghoulies whilst TSW aired the American fantasy comedy Just Our Luck. HTV broadcast a tale from the International Storybook and Granada dusted off The Adventures of Black Beauty; Grampian screened a further episode of Happy Days.

Replacing Up The Elephant and Round The Castle (at 8pm in some regions, 8.30pm in others), TSW aired Tim Conway vehicle Ace Crawford, Private Eye whilst Yorkshire paid a further visit to Marbella in Duty Free; Grampian screened another episode of The Adventurer.

With thanks to The TV Museum

Members of the National Association of Theatrical, Television and Kine Employees (NATTKE) voted not to cross picket lines;⁴⁰ meanwhile, Thames management and union representatives met separately at ACAS for exploratory discussions; by now, over 1000 technicians had joined the dispute.⁴¹

Friday’s line-up on Thames, running until 5.15pm, opened with a Gary Cooper film previously scheduled for 19 October.

Friday 26 October 1984

• 1.40pm Film: The Wedding Night
• 3pm Mary Berry
• 3.30pm Sons and Daughters
• 4pm We’ll Tell You a Story
• 4.15pm Cockleshell Bay
• 4.30pm The Sooty Show
• 4.45pm Five Magic Minutes
• 4.50pm Freetime

Following the non-appearance of Middle English during schools programming, two further Thames shows were absent from network schedules: Rainbow at 12noon & 4pm was replaced with more Smurf-based antics on TSW & Channel whilst STV also featured animation with Bamse, the world’s strongest bear. Granada screened an edition of its own pre-school programme A Handful of Songs whilst cartoons aired on TVS & Anglia.

Finally, at 4.50pm, a new series based on the Davenport Collection of magic-related ephemera, Illusions, was postponed. Anglia repeated an edition of its own series Animals in Action; similarly, Granada looked to its archive for Graham’s Ark on the subject of ‘big dogs’. STV screened a Canadian film from 1978, The Game Reserves of South Africa (along with a bonus Abbott & Costello cartoon) whilst Grampian, eschewing the trend for natural world documentaries, paid yet another visit to the Cunninghams in Happy Days. Following an uninterrupted weekend’s viewing courtesy of LWT, Thames resumed its temporary service on Monday.

With thanks to Ferguson Videostar

Monday 29 October 1984

• 1.40pm Film: Wuthering Heights
• 3.30pm The Young Doctors
• 4pm We’ll Tell You a Story
• 4.15pm Button Moon
• 4.30pm The Sooty Show
• 4.45pm Danger Mouse
• 5pm The Coral Island
• 5.30pm Botanic Man
• 6pm Diff’rent Strokes
• 6.30pm Keep It In The Family
• 7pm Knight Rider
• 8pm Tripper’s Day*
• 8.30pm Fresh Fields
• 9pm The Sweeney
• 10pm Quincy
• 11pm Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense
• 12.15am Night Thoughts

The Coral Island, an adventure series originally screened in 1983, aired daily at 5pm (4.45pm on Friday). The episode of Quincy was entitled ‘The Golden Hour’ with ‘Paint Me a Murder’ as the featured Hammer drama.

As per the previous Monday, the affected ITV Schools broadcasts were The English Programme, Seeing and Doing and The French Programme; however, with Central’s new drama Murphy’s Mob beginning its run at 4.45pm, only one Children’s ITV show – Flicks at 12noon & 4pm – was disrupted. In its place, Anglia, Central, Grampian & TVS all ran cartoons; Yorkshire, Granada & HTV screened their own productions, Gammon and Spinach, A Handful of Songs and Flower Stories respectively. The Adventures of the Blue Knight aired on STV whilst TSW & Channel showed European Folktales at 12noon and The Smurfs at 4pm.

Later, a variety of domestic and imported sitcoms replaced the final episode of Tripper’s Day at 8pm. Grampian, TSW & Channel went stateside for an episode of the Lynn Redgrave comedy Teachers Only, likewise Central (Nine to Five) and STV (Benson). Closer to home, Anglia & HTV offered repeats of YTV’s Bill Maynard vehicle The Gaffer; Yorkshire themselves screened another of its own productions, In Loving Memory.

Granada opted for stand-up comedy with The Comedians whilst Tyne Tees deviated from the pack with a musical offering, Jack Jones in concert at HTV’s Culverhouse Cross studio.

Once again, Tuesday’s line-up on Thames benefited from their originally scheduled peak-time line-up.

Tuesday 30 October 1984

• 1.40pm Film: The Odd Couple
• 3.30pm The Young Doctors
• 4pm Rainbow
• 4.15pm Chorlton and the Wheelies
• 4.30pm The Sooty Show
• 4.45pm Danger Mouse
• 5pm The Coral Island
• 5.30pm Botanic Man
• 6pm Diff’rent Strokes
• 6.30pm Keep It In The Family
• 7pm Carry On Laughing
• 7.30pm Give Us a Clue*
• 8pm Des O’Connor Tonight
• 9pm The Bill*
• 10pm Shelley
• 10.30pm Class of ‘62
• 11.25pm Night Thoughts

Although airing in its assigned slot, Des O’Connor Tonight was a repeated edition; however, The Bill continued its new series with the episode ‘Clutching at Straws’. Shelley – ‘Brave New World’ – was followed by Marilyn Gaunt’s 1983 reunion documentary.

Outside of London, ITV Schools programmes aired as scheduled; otherwise, there was severe disruption throughout the day. A variety of children’s shows replaced Rainbow at 12.10pm including Bamse the Bear (STV), Sally & Jake (Ulster), Unicorn Tales (Tyne Tees), Get Up and Go (Yorkshire), Flower Stories (HTV), European Folktales (TSW & Channel) and Wincey’s Pets (Granada).

At 2.30pm, Anglia’s replacement for Daytime was the ever-present clip show That’s Hollywood; Tyne Tees repeated an edition of its recent documentary series fronted by Jack Charlton, Big Jack’s British. Central deployed an instalment of its own business technology series Venture; STV viewers enjoyed another outing for Tom Weir whilst Granada, TSW, Channel & Ulster all visited the art studio of Nancy Kominsky. Grampian aired an episode of the American sitcom Silver Spoons.

CBTV at 4.45pm was switched for the usual eclectic mix of children’s standby material such as Unicorn Tales (Anglia), Sport Billy (Ulster), The Smurfs (Yorkshire & TVS), International Storybook (HTV), The Final Frontier (Granada), Silver Spoons (STV) and Short Story Theatre (Tyne Tees). Elsewhere, with Hallowe’en fast approaching, seasonal scares were to be found courtesy of Fangface (Grampian) and the Groovy Ghoulies (Central) whilst TSW & Channel selected the 1979 animated short Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy in the Pumpkin Who Couldn’t Smile, a title surely worthy of an appearance in Give Us a Clue.

For the second week running, Tuesday’s planned peak-time line-up from 7.30pm to 10pm was absent, prompting most regions to consult their film libraries; this time, Nevada Smith popped up on TSW & Channel whilst Anglia & HTV screened the adventures of Sean Connery and Michael Caine in The Man Who Would Be King. An episode of Benson on Central preceded the crime drama Diamonds with Robert Shaw; Carry On Up The Jungle on Granada was followed by Magnum – a story entitled ‘Smaller Than Life’ – at 9pm and Tyne Tees aired the 1968 war drama The Green Berets with John Wayne.

Yorkshire selected the biopic MacArthur, The Rebel General starring Gregory Peck whilst Grampian opted for sci-fi TV movie A Fire In The Sky. STV viewers enjoyed a variety of silent-era stunts in the 1962 compilation The Great Chase, followed by an episode of Magnum at 9pm; Border’s fare was somewhat less frantic – Robert Redford and Mia Farrow in The Great Gatsby.

At ACAS, mediation continued with some tentative progress being made after almost twelve hours of talks; a further meeting was scheduled for the following day.⁴²

Wednesday’s peak-time offering from Thames was prominently displayed in the London Evening Standard.

Wednesday 31 October

• 1.40pm A Country Practice
• 2.30pm Mary Berry
• 3pm The Adventurer
• 3.30pm Sons and Daughters
• 4pm Cockleshell Bay
• 4.15pm Flicks
• 4.30pm The Sooty Show
• 4.45pm Danger Mouse
• 5pm The Coral Island
• 5.30pm Botanic Man
• 6pm Diff’rent Strokes
• 6.30pm Keep It In The Family
• 7pm Name That Tune*
• 7.30pm Morecambe & Wise
• 8pm The Mike Yarwood Hour
• 9pm Minder*
• 10pm Film: The Island of Dr Moreau
• 11.45pm Night Thoughts

Minder at 9pm was a new instalment, contrary to newspaper listings advertising a repeat of the first episode from 1979; this was, in fact, the intended final chapter of the current series, ‘The Balance of Power’.

Craft, Design and Technology and The English Programme were the day’s two absentees from ITV Schools, whilst Rod, Jane & Freddy at 12noon & 4pm were once again replaced with varied delights; a selection of cartoons aired on Anglia, Border, Central, Grampian, TVS & Ulster whilst Granada dipped into its own archive for Songbook; likewise, Yorkshire with Gammon and Spinach. Flower Stories (HTV), The Adventures of The Blue Knight (STV) and a combination of European Folktales at 12noon and The Smurfs at 4pm (TSW & Channel) filled the gaps elsewhere.

7pm’s appointment with Name That Tune prompted some regions to repeat their own productions, such as STV’s Closer To Home, a documentary on the Highland Games in America, Border’s Look Who’s Talking fronted by Derek Batey, Granada-based mayhem with the Grumbleweeds and Ulster’s Country Style with host Gene Fitzpatrick. Elsewhere, imports including Ace Crawford – Private Eye (Anglia), Benson (Grampian, TSW & Channel), Diff’rent Strokes (Yorkshire & TVS) and – of course – Happy Days (Central & HTV) filled the slot. Tyne Tees looked to their regional neighbours for a repeat of YTV’s The Gaffer.

From 8pm, most regions opted for films. Border’s offering was the post-WWII drama Tunes of Glory starring John Mills and Alec Guinness; TVS featured Gene Hackman in March or Die whilst Granada screened the John Wayne comedic adventure Donovan’s Reef. Elsewhere, The Thief Who Came To Dinner (Grampian), Von Ryan’s Express (Central), Butch Cassidy & Sundance – The Early Years (Yorkshire), Operation Crossbow (HTV) and Where The Spies Are (Anglia) ran until News at Ten. Special mention should be made of Tyne Tees’ selection, Tyrone Power and Henry Fonda in the 1939 crime drama Jesse James; the oldest standby material to appear in peak-time during the dispute.

A handful of areas declined films in favour of music and drama. STV once again welcomed the Scottish Fiddle Orchestra – their third such outing since the initial Thames dispute in August – before The New Avengers at 9pm. TSW viewers saw Tom Jones perform at Knott’s before Patrick Mower and George Layton guest starred in The Sweeney episode ‘Trojan Bus’.

31 October 1984 was, of course, the 25th anniversary of Ulster Television’s launch; following a celebration of songwriter Percy French at 8pm, the channel aired its scheduled birthday special at 9pm. The intended screening of Minder at 10.30pm was then substituted with an episode of the Hammer horror anthology series Journey To The Unknown.

Back at Thames, the unity of the strike was weakening, with The Guardian reporting that 200 of the 500 ACTT staff at Teddington had signed a petition urging a return to work. ⁴³ Meanwhile, Thursday’s makeshift schedule on Thames included an early evening feature film and two new series.

Thursday 1 November 1984

• 1.40pm Falcon Crest
• 2.30pm Mary Berry
• 3pm The Adventurer
• 3.30pm Sons and Daughters
• 4pm Rod, Jane & Freddy
• 4.15pm Jamie And The Magic Torch
• 4.30pm The Sooty Show
• 4.45pm Danger Mouse
• 5pm The Coral Island
• 5.30pm Botanic Man
• 6pm Diff’rent Strokes
• 6.30pm Keep It In The Family
• 7pm Whose Baby?
• 7.30pm News Headlines then Film: The Eagle Has Landed (1976)
• 10pm George Robinson of Newmarket
• 10.30pm New Series: The Master
• 11.30pm New Series: Jobs Limited
• 11.55pm Night Thoughts

The 10pm documentary was a repeat of an item originally shown within the daytime A Plus strand. The Master, an American drama starring Lee Van Cleef, began with the episode ‘Max’ whilst new factual programme Jobs Limited debuted in its originally planned timeslot.

With thanks to Ferguson Videostar

Across the network, ITV Schools programmes Middle English, Seeing and Doing and Craft, Design and Technology were blacked out. Various factual shows replaced Daytime at 2.30pm including Portrait of a Legend (Anglia), Hands (Granada), At Home with…Jilly Cooper (HTV), Big Jack’s British (‘Trooper Charlton’, Tyne Tees), The Moviemakers (TSW & Channel), Paint Along with Nancy (TVS) and Clegg’s People (Yorkshire).

In the evening, the absence of Up The Elephant and Round The Castle and TV Eye prompted several regions to shuffle their line-ups: Anglia’s celebrity snooker show A Frame With [Steve] Davis, originally shown on Channel 4, made an impromptu appearance at 8pm following Knight Rider whilst at 8.30pm, TVS inserted an episode of Kojak, ‘Conspiracy of Silence’ and Yorkshire replaced Jim Davidson with a further repeat of their own sitcom Duty Free.

Diff’rent Strokes and The Adventurer aired at 8.30pm on Border and Grampian respectively whilst films were added to the schedules of Central (Carry On Abroad, 7.30pm) and Granada (Battle for the Planet of the Apes, 8.30pm).

Later, in place of TV Eye at 9.30pm, some regions substituted other factual programmes. TVS screened a 1982 edition of its series Just Williams entitled ‘Gherkin and Truffle Go To War’, a documentary on WWII. Tyne Tees aired ‘Hunters of Okavango’, an episode of Anglia’s Survival series; similarly, Grampian opted for an instalment of Orphans of the Wild, an imported nature series, whilst TSW repeated a film from its own Scene South West strand.

Elsewhere, STV welcomed Jonathan and Jennifer in Hart to Hart at 9pm, whilst Border completed its revised line-up with the 1973 crime short, The Laughing Girl Murder; Yorkshire aired a repeat of Thora Hird sitcom Hallelujah! ahead of News at Ten.

On Friday 2 November, the dispute was resolved. ACTT members voted to accept Thames management’s offer, settled at ACAS talks the prior evening. Staff agreed to the conditions of the originally proposed remuneration; specifically, that the two-phase 20% increase would be tied to the introduction of new technology ⁴⁴ with the ACTT committing to start immediate negotiations on the introduction of single-operator video cameras. Future pay negotiations would concern all relevant employees rather than the existing arrangement of multiple agreements within the Thames ACTT membership. ⁴⁵

Programme production would resume on Saturday;⁴⁶ meanwhile, Thames management concluded its emergency service with Friday’s programming.

With thanks to Ferguson Videostar

Friday 2 November 1984

• 1.40pm Film: Raffles
• 2.50pm Cartoon Time
• 3pm Mary Berry
• 3.30pm Sons and Daughters
• 4pm Rainbow
• 4.15pm Button Moon
• 4.30pm The Sooty Show
• 4.45pm The Coral Island

Middle English was the only schools programme affected on Friday. Later, Rainbow at 12.10pm and 4pm was replaced with the now-familiar pattern of substitutions: various cartoons in most regions (Anglia, Border, Central, Grampian, TVS, Tyne Tees & Ulster), A Handful of Songs (Granada), Get Up and Go (Yorkshire), Flora and Fauna (STV), Flower Stories (HTV) and European Folktales (12.10pm) & The Smurfs (4pm) (TSW/Channel).

Two further Children’s ITV shows were blacked out. At 4.25pm, Granada substituted The Wind In The Willows with Japanese animation Kum Kum whilst Yorkshire paid another visit to The Smurfs. Then, at 4.50pm, Illusions – on the subject of escapology – was replaced on Granada with another instalment of Graham’s Ark. Yorkshire repeated an edition of its own 1982 geography-based series, Two-Way Ticket.

Other regions screened fifty-minute shows to cover both gaps with The Adventures of Black Beauty (STV), The Nancy Drew Mysteries (Anglia & Central), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Border), CHiPs (‘Tiger In The Streets’, HTV) and The Little House on the Prairie (Grampian) all making an appearance.

As ever, normal service resumed with LWT at 5.15pm; Thames’ management service and the regular sight of unscheduled changes elsewhere came to an end. However, it would be several months before the full backlog of displaced programmes made it to the air.

Thames’ initial challenge was to catch up with serials, soaps and schools programmes. Having aired five episodes of The Coral Island during the dispute, the channel rapidly screened the final four chapters on Monday 5, Wednesday 7, Thursday 8 and Monday 12 November at 4.45pm; these displaced Wednesday’s Razzmatazz and Murphy’s Mob, the latter airing across the network on Mondays and Thursdays but yet to debut in London. The Central series would eventually reach Thames on Wednesday 14 Nov at 4.45pm (in place of Razzmatazz) and continued on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays into December. In turn, viewers in the capital enjoyed weekday morning screenings of Razzmatazz for two weeks beginning Monday 10 December (except Friday 14 and Monday 17).

In addition to the regular Monday and Wednesday slots, additional episodes of Coronation Street aired in London on Tuesday 6 November (7pm), Thursday 15 November (7.30pm), Thursday 22 November (7.30pm), Tuesday 27 November (7.30pm) and Tuesday 4 December (7.30pm). On the latter two occasions, the rest of the ITV network caught up with the two displaced editions of Give Us a Clue. Meanwhile, on Thursdays throughout November, truncated editions of Thames News and Thames Sport (running for twenty minutes apiece) enabled visits to the Crossroads motel at 6.40pm.

The displaced ITV Schools output was screened in December, with Thames’ programmes airing nationally on Thursday 6 & Friday 7. London viewers then received the backlog of non-Thames titles such as Picture Box, Stop, Look and Listen and How We Used To Live from Monday 10 – Friday 14 December whilst other regions aired pre-Christmas holiday children’s programmes.

Name That Tune, This Is Your Life, Mike Yarwood In Persons and Des O’Connor Tonight all reclaimed their regular slots though the latter took a one week break on Tuesday 4 December, allowing The Benny Hill Show – lost from Bank Holiday Monday – to air at 8pm.

Other programmes appeared in London and beyond as time and schedules permitted. For Thames viewers, The Krypton Factor resumed on Thursday 15 November at 7pm with the competition’s finale airing in the same slot one week later. Sandy Gall’s documentary on Afghanistan was screened on Wednesday 5 December at 11.40pm whilst the final episode in the second series of Duty Free reached Thames’ screens on Thursday 20 December at 8pm.

The Eric Morecambe tribute Bring Me Sunshine, which had been threatened by the dispute, took place as planned in November and was networked on Christmas Day. Up The Elephant and Round The Castle stayed on the shelf until January (the one episode already shown on Thames – ‘The Hostage’ – went out nationally as the last of the run), with Never The Twain repeats taking its place meanwhile.

The unscreened episode of Minder, ‘Hypnotising Rita’, originally scheduled for Wednesday 24 October, aired nationally on Tuesday 1 January 1985 at 9.15pm. Then, ‘The Long Ride Back To Scratchwood’, was broadcast outside London on Monday 7 January at 9pm (except STV, Monday 21 January at 9pm) with ‘The Balance of Power’ following on Monday 14 January 1985, also at 9pm; Thames screened episodes of Quincy.

Whilst The Bill continued in its regular slot – Tuesdays at 9pm – from 6 November, two episodes remained unscreened outside London until the new year: ‘A Friend In Need’ aired on Tuesday 29 January 1985 at 9pm with ‘Clutching At Straws’ in the same slot the following week; on both occasions, Thames aired repeats of The Sweeney.

Elton John in Central Park aired on Boxing Day whilst on Easter Monday – 224 days late – Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren’s crime drama The Long Good Friday finally enjoyed its ITV premiere.

The autumn disputes of 1984 were by no means the last instances of industrial disruption to affect the company and, indeed, ITV as a whole, though there would be no such protracted blackouts of Thames programming again. Meanwhile, the precedent of an individual company staging a successful, management-run service had been established; in 1987, this tactic would be seen again within the ITV network.

Footnotes

Listings information from: Aberdeen Evening Express, Daily Mail, Glasgow Evening Times, Glasgow Herald, The Guardian, Liverpool Echo, London Evening Standard, Newcastle Evening Chronicle, Newcastle Journal, The Press & Journal, Reading Post, The Times

ITV Schools information from: Broadcast For Schools

The post Carry On Euston appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.

The Television Industry is going through a revolution — a colour revolution. Just how the coming of colour will affect us no-one is quite sure. Some people, particularly in the field of Engineering Research, have been concerned with colour developments for a considerable time. But for many the difficulties — and the excitement — are about to begin. Bringing colour to the screens presents much more scope to departments other than the purely technical. We cannot hope to go into it all here. This feature looks at colour through the eyes of four people intimately concerned with the ultimate product of the company — the programmes as they appear on the screen: Technical Operations, Design, Production and Outside Broadcasts. While these may not be completely representational what they have to say is relevant to us all.

Bob Simmons
Senior Supervisor (Vision)

For Bob Simmons (below) and his team of Lighting Directors and Vision Engineers, colour technology brings the excitement and problems of using new and complex equipment and developing new techniques.

“The whole industry is going through a revolution and manufacturers are gradually catching up with our demands for new and better tools. In the field of lighting equipment there is still room for improvement. Smaller and lighter units, and consequently lighter suspension systems must come and our problem here is to order only the minimum number of units absolutely essential for the next stage of development, hoping a better unit will be available before the order comes through. In some cases we are ordering lamps still on the drawing boards.”

But Bob is optimistic about the future:

“There are no problems which cannot be solved and if present progress is anything to go by, solved quickly.

“For instance, in Studio One at Teddington which is now fully equipped for colour, we know we have got the best colour camera available – the EMI 2001. It has the two vital essentials: good engineering and good colour imagery. It is also very stable and has easy access for maintenance.

“We’ve got the right cameras, we’ve got the best available lighting: I know we’ve got the right people, and the right people have got and are gaining the right sort of experience. Already they are producing very exciting results.

“Because our team is relatively small and we have regular meetings to discuss all aspects of the operation, our rate of progress is very fast and our expertise is growing daily.”

As part of Studio One’s conversion a completely new area has been built at control room level – the Colour Set Up Area. Bob was photographed here and part of the new equipment can be seen. It looks very neat and deceptively simple in the photograph, but the job it performs is highly specialised. It is here that the electronic line-up and matching is done, and the one set-up area will eventually service all studios. It is centralised in order to keep to a minimum the lengths of cable handling timing pulses which demand a very high order of accuracy.

“Our past experiences have that shown the contribution which lighting can make to the finished product is even more significant than before and often overlaps the sphere of design,” says Bob. “This merging of areas of effectiveness leads to the necessity for close collaboration at all stages of preliminary planning and with this in mind the Lighting Directors have been rehoused in an area next to the Design Department.”

As a final sobering thought, though, he adds: “We must never lose sight of the fact that the large majority of our viewers for many years to come will see our product in black and white. Everything we do must be considered from that view-point.

There are no problems that cannot be solved – and if present progress is anything to go by – solved quickly

Many beautiful colour effects may have to be modified or jettisoned for the sake of the compatible signal.”

Pat Downing
Head of Design

According to Patrick Downing (below), the Design Department is well prepared to move into colour, for. obvious reasons: “Colour isn’t new to designers – initially they are all trained in colour. Although for the past few years Graphic Designers have got used to working with black, white and grey because it’s cheaper. Set designers haven’t because coloured paint costs the same as white paint.”

As far as he is concerned, colour is here already – “what we have been doing in the way of preparation for the past three months or so, is designing all our Armchair Theatres and one-hour dramas as if they were in colour.”

What he sees as the problem area is not the practical problem of colours coming out differently – “basically colours on the colour camera come out more or less as you would expect them to”, but – “aesthetically, it is going to be quite different.

“For instance in the ‘Armchair Theatre’ I am currently designing now with Voytek as Director (himself an ex-designer) and Louis Bottone as Lighting Director, we are working with a minute set – a hairdressing salon, itself quite a colourful set, but by the end of the play we make it less and less colourful, to make a dramatic point.”

A central problem of interpretation for Designers is that colour is emotional. There has been a lot of research on this point and the results can be seen every day in advertising and packaging. And there are social and cultural overtones. Patrick’s Departments are well aware of these.

“What you do at the moment if you are designing a flat for Vanessa Redgrave, say, who is playing a painter living in Central London, is to find objects and forms which simulate the contemporary London scene. With colour you will have much more freedom; the environment can be decorated to express all the emotions that she will want to express in that setting.”

Where once we might have tended to walk into the studio and done a lot of handwaving, we now have to be a lot more precise

This means that designers will have to start working much earlier than before, because they will have to consider the colour of the costumes and sets related to the emotions and actions of the play.

“Scenic Artists in particular will have a tougher job. Whereas before we might have given them a rough sketch or a photograph and said this goes outside this window on the ground plan, now we have to be more specific, and we now give them coloured drawings, not necessarily naturalistic, depending on the mood of the programme.

“The Design Buyer’s job has also become more involved. Now one must be precise and specific about the colours and the props we hire.”

Pat also sees closer ties with the technical side: “We have in fact become much more involved over the last few months. Where once we might have tended to walk into a studio and done a lot of handwaving, we have now to become a lot more precise.

“Again, whereas in the past one could always ‘wing it’ a bit in the studio – you can’t now have a standby painter slosh over a step or something like that because it’s a bit too dark. That will have to be decided beforehand.”

Reginald Collin
Producer/Director Drama

For Director/Producer Reginald Collin (below) the coming of colour means excitement. “It means that Producers and Directors are re-thinking their whole approach to television,” he says. “For us at Thames the light has changed from Red to Green, and what a beautiful colour that is.

“There will be problems; after all we will be new to the game. And there will be occasions when we will fall flat on our faces. But even that will be splendid, because I sincerely hope that we will not adopt an attitude of safety first.”

Reg echoes one of the points that Bob Simmons makes: “We have here at Thames, probably the best engineers in the business. They will deliver the goods. They will, I am sure, want us to experiment; they will want us to use their equipment to the fullest, and what is more important they are on our side. I know that we will try to produce superb programmes as much for their sake as ours. And we have the people who can do it.”

So much for the credit side, enthusiasm and talent; what are the problems?

“First of all there is the question of producing colour programmes that will, initially, be seen by the majority of viewers in black and white. What attitude do we take? In my view, we go bald-headed for Colour. Black and white is going to become extinct. The thinking must be colour, colour, colour.

“We cannot compromise. Then there are problems of matching film to studio and the speed with which colour film can be shot and processed and put into programmes. It would be foolish to dismiss these lightly, they are severe question marks: but they will be overcome. I know that the Film Department have been working on the subject for some little time, and their efforts will succeed.

“Finally, the universal problem, TIME. More time at all stages will be needed for colour. It may only be a matter of minutes here and there, but it will add up. It may mean that we all have to work just that much harder, but I believe the spirit is there, at all levels, to do just that.”

Apart from the enthusiasm and the problems, what about the challenge? What sort of programmes are we going to make and what colours will we use?

“Imagination will have free rein. For example, are we going to make programmes that look like our holiday slides, slightly larger than life; or are we really going to use colour to create atmosphere.

Think of ‘Callan’, a sort of downbeat, grotty, gritty series and you think of dirty browns and greys, not much colour knocking about. Then think of ‘Frontier’ and immediately the rich sparkle of military uniforms and the bright landscapes of India spring to mind.

“And it’s not just to make things look different or pretty. Colour will add to the emotional enjoyment of programmes; we may even be able to make people laugh or cry at home in a way that is almost impossible in black and white. And again, we will be able, on rare and subtle occasions, to use colour for its own sake; and why not?”

Colour means excitement. The Industry is ready for this shot in the arm

We are lucky to be in at the beginning, Reg concludes. “In a few years colour will become commonplace, but for us we have the joy of trying to make it work. This is what I think is exciting and why I think colour is exciting. I think the industry is ready for, and needs, this shot in the arm.”

Fred Atkinson
Technical Manager, Mobile Division

At the present moment the mobile division at Hanworth has ‘Unit Four’ which is equipped with two Mark VII colour cameras and they are hoping in the near future to start some form of operational training programme using this Unit. They are also waiting to receive from Ampex a delivery of a 1200E colour capable video tape machine, which will bring to the Unit colour recording capability.

The scheduled date for the completion of the first major OB Unit in colour which will be equipped with four camera channels is 1 April. The conversion of this Unit is taking place at the present moment at Hanworth. It is envisaged that by November Thames will be the possessors of two four channel Units and a two channel Unit.

Getting this equipment ready does present problems of course, but for Fred Atkinson (above) the exciting prospects of colour outweigh the headaches: “For instance, viewers will no longer have the problem of distinguishing one soccer player from another in almost identical grey jerseys, now they will be seen in true colour.”

And: “Horse racing in colour means being able to identify your horse before they get far enough down the field for the commentators to start to speak about it.”

OBs are very different from studio productions and they present their special problems.

“The difficulties are based on the requirement for long term stability of equipment necessary to guarantee consistent colour pictures, this within the limitation imposed by the required mobility of Outside Broadcast equipment. Unlike the studios the camera channels cannot be left on for 24 hours of each day. The warm up time and setting up periods needed on OBs will invariably cause a prolongation of the involvement of each unit in any OB. If we are to meet the load currently undertaken by the Mobile Division when colour arrives, the vacant days at present found between OBs will probably disappear altogether.”

Lighting on location also differs from studio conditions. “When an interior programme is considered the light level will be higher than that currently used in black and white, and since at present we are taking very near to peak load from the various supply connections used, the survey planners are going to have to look deeper into this matter to find more power.

“Colour also requires special handling: The human eye reacts to a very small area of action in the scene in front, whereas the television camera takes in a large area – an area which could, in the case of soccer or horseracing, go from brilliant sunshine to shadow in a very short space of time. So what might tend to occur is that one scene appears half sunshine and half shadow. And the two halves will appear in slightly different colours. When this occurs a compromise must be reached to present a viewable picture. The eye is much more discerning and reacts automatically, the TV camera needs fast, accurate controlling.”

Fred also points out that colours will be affected on OBs if they are taking place during early morning or late afternoon, since the colour of the sunlight at these hours is much different from that between 11.00 and 16.00 on a summer’s day.

Let the colours do some of the work and decrease the number of cameras needed

Fred does not see these as anything but temporary limitations. “The future holds a lot of possibilities for outside broadcasts. The present idea of holding a camera still and letting the subject move can now be extended to read: ‘Let the colours do some of the work and decrease the number of cameras needed’.

“The increase in subject interest created by colour television can overcome the need to decorate the picture with a multiplicity of cuts and mixes in an attempt to hold the viewer. If this can be accepted, the size of outside broadcast units can be reduced and the number increased, so giving way to more mobility and flexibility.”

Photographs by Gerald Sunderland

The post Forecast for colour appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.

The photograph above is indexed as follows: 1 is a rough ground plan for our new building; 2 is the ICL block; and 3 the Euston Tower. The illustrations below are marked similarly.

This photograph shows the shell of the studio and technical areas. While work goes on with the upper floors, the interior of this area will be finished. Already the studio floors and walls are made, windows are being fitted to enclose the operational areas and the ventilation plant is being installed.

The sketch shows the full depth of the building – longer than Television House – from the Euston Road front door to the back overlooking Drummond Street. The part built extends only to the first ‘roadway’ passing through the building and only goes up to the second floor ceiling.

It is this first section with office space for some 50 people (phase 1), which will be completely ready for colour in November – the whole will not be ready for occupation until June or July of 1970.

There is still some shuffling of office areas going on and will probably go on until May 1970, but the general layout is now settled.

The second floor, starting from the Euston Road end, has wardrobe office/workroom, Telecine, VTR, Sound Maintenance, the Telephone Exchange, Technical Film Department offices, and then the Film Department, taking the major slice, right to the end of the floor.

The Film Department also have areas on the floor below and a vault in the basement, all joined by a goods/staff lift.

The third floor is entirely Programme Department, except for a cluster of Preview Theatres and viewing rooms, and overflows on to the fourth and fifth floors too. The fourth floor is mainly Sales, complete with Press, Research, Promotion and other closely-allied departments. On each of these floors the Director in charge has his office and immediate staff – thus there is no ‘executive floor’ as such.

The fifth floor does have the highest executive concentration, however, for instance the Board Room and Conference Rooms are all up there. The Restaurant and Club take up about one-third of the area and should have a good view over the whole site. A lot of thought has been applied to finding a layout for this area in which the cross-traffic is reduced to a minimum, and our architects’ experience on previous jobs like the Hilton Hotel (if not the Bunny Club – another of their designs) is proving valuable.

“Three teams of architects are working on the project and the co-ordination of all the contractors and sub-contractors is quite a major headache” says Phil Berkeley Head of Engineering Projects for Thames. “Team One is designing the building shell for the development company, Team Two is adding the internal work to make it a Television Centre, while Team Three are looking after the Technical areas where all the acoustic and other specialised problems occur.”

Philip’s job is to find out what people in Thames want (or think they will want in 1970/75) and feed this information in architectural terms to these teams. And of course to keep a co-ordinating eye on all the Engineering Department people planning technical facilities in detail. Currently we have Bob Warren looking after the Master Control, Presentation and C.A.R. areas – the heart of the system, Gunter Karn looking after Sound and Talkback – the nerves of the studio complex, while Alan Blockley looks after Telecine and VTR area – the eyes and memory if you like. The sole survivor of Engineering in Television House, Len Sutton, is looking after Film Department equipment requirements, and pretty major their changes are for colour.

Dozens of other people are involved, adds Philip, and the number will increase as the months go by.

Ken Pike is involved in the internal telephone and intercom systems, Fred Atkinson and Mike Coxhill with the GPO lines joining us to the Tower (right opposite but still needing 18 months’ notice to get the cables installed) and of course Stuart Sansom keeps an overall eye on engineering principles, policy, money, the ITA requirements and such ‘seeing the wood from the trees’ matters.

This leaves out all those at TVH who are actively helping to define the requirements, lay old ghosts and warn of new developments – have a new look at the familiar problems and try to anticipate how colour will affect all this. As Philip says, “Colour does indeed penetrate almost every aspect of our work, and we are continually using Boris Townsend and his team as a sort of talking encyclopaedia and instant idea testing station!”

Their work is beginning to show results at Teddington, where Studio One is most of the way to colour operation.

The post Euston – a bird’s eye view appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.

The basic difference between the news at nine on BBC 1 and News at Ten on ITV is one of style rather than content — Dougall’s Magic Porthole against the informal mateyness of the two-man team on the other channel.

The events recorded by each may be much the same, but somehow the news seems graver on the BBC, despite the Peeping Tom effect of watching it through that spyhole, as if one were a morbid voyeur prying furtively into the world’s misfortunes.

By contrast News at Ten purveys good cheer, probably because two newscasters simle more than one. Over to Reggie. Smile. Back to Leonard. Smile. BBC newscasters have little chance to smile as they plough their lonely way through the average day’s quota of civil war, famine, motorway deaths and riots, though sometimes they are given a dreadful pun to deliver and then they smile bravely to hide the pain.

About News at Ten there is often the kind of ruthless optimism that characterized the Daily Express in Beaverbrook’s time. Things, it seems to say, are not that bad. Outer Mongolia may be on the brink of nuclear war with Inner Latvia but Reggie and Leonard (or Andrew and Sandy) have tucked their pens away and smiled at each other and life goes on. This can be most reassuring to a viewer on his way to bed and, with luck, a dreamless nights sleep; it is also, they say at ITN, the most effective way of disseminating news.

The aim there is to produce a programme rather than a bulletin, to communicate as well as to inform. “At the BBC,” Leonard Parkin once said, rather unkindly, “they produce news like the Water Board produces tap water. At ITN we feel one can be responsible without being dull.” Punting it another way, Nigel Ryan, ITN’s editor, says: “Our priorities are objectivity, clarity and humanity. They are equally important.”

Derrick Amoore, recently appointed editor of BBC Television News, might claim much the same thing himself. Certainly the BBC’s bulletins are at least as objective and clear as ITN’s. Even in the field of humanity, Mr. Amoore says stoutly, the BBC is up there with the front runners. “The News at Ten chaps are lovely,” he admits, “but our chaps are lovely, too. Robert Dougall can’t go down the street without being mobbed, and Richard Baker has the highest personal rating of any news reader in the country.”

Mr. Amoore, who has been editor since March 1, has made no great changes and claims to have none planned for the future. “New brooms are very boring and very inefficient. If I was the inheritor of a broken-down machine I might well be worried. But in fact, as far as we’re concerned, more people look at us than at them.”

This may well be true, since the B.B.C. produces nine hours’ and I.T.N. only six hours’ news a week. But the certain area of rivalry, so far as ratings are concerned, revolves round the nine o’clock news on B.B.C. 1 and News at Ten. Sadly, BBC2’s Newsroom at 7.30, which is crisp, informative and comprehensive, and perhaps the best news programme on television, hardly registers with the viewers. It has an audience of about 300,000 compared with nine million or more for the later bulletins on the other channels.

Which of these two actually has the higher viewing figure is debatable; the BBC claims approximate parity, I.T.N. a dear superiority. But since they measure their audiences in entirely different ways the statistics are virtually meaningless.

Barry Norman
The Times 1 June 1971

Comment from Thames

As most JICTAR watchers will know, there’s very little in it as far as audience ratings go. Since the beginning of this year, News at Ten has been marginally ahead of the BBC’s Nine O’clock News in the Thames area. ITN’s best nights are Monday and Thursday.

But the important things to note are, first, that News at Ten averages a London homes audience of nearly 1,500,000 homes every night; and secondly that its audience is of a very special quality.

For example, Thames recently commissioned two studies* of the News at Ten audience. First, a series of interviews with AB men revealed that:

• 79% of AB MEN in the Thames area watch NEWS AT TEN regularly – the highest percentage for any BBC or ITV programme including the 9.00 News.
• 57% of AB MEN in the Thames area watch NEWS AT TEN up to three times a week.
• 43% watch it four or five times a week.

In the second study, two hundred leading businessmen (all Chairmen or Managing Directors of companies listed in The Times 500 for 1969-70) were asked for their confidential views about News at Ten.

• 64% of these top businessmen watch News at Ten at least once a week.
• 34% watch three, four or five times a week.

The majority rated News at Ten and BBC 9.00 News equally on clarity of reporting, reliability, lack of bias and standard of news reading.

But News at Ten was the clear leader on RANGE OF COVERAGE, SUITABILITY OF TIMING, and INTEREST OF PRODUCTION.

* 1. Personal interviews with 200 AB Men in Thames area carried out by Dataplan.
2. Personal questionnaire answered by 200 leading businessmen.

The Grocer, of course, is full of ads like this. Ads that tell retailers and wholesalers about imminent television campaigns or recent TV successes. But have you counted the ads that mention imminent Press campaigns lately? Try it. You’ll find that practically nobody thinks they’re worth shouting about as far as the trade is concerned…

PS: Have you ever thought of telling your retailers about a TV campaign -on TV?

The post News at 9.00 – news at 10.00? appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.

D Day help for Staff

For some people the first sign that decimalisation was with us came with the arrival of the Jictar Report for the week ending 10 January. The cost per thousands, previously expressed in shillings, were in new pence.

Sales Department and their clients are already getting used to the new type of information. Example: a 30 second commercial slotted at the end of This Is Your Life on 6 January reached 1,920,000 homes in the London ITV area at a cost per thousand of 83 new pence (previous cost per ’000 would actually have been 16/7d but rounded up in the ‘old’ reports to 17/-).

For most of us Decimalisation is still something to be grappled with.

D Day, Monday 15 February, is however only a fortnight away, and Chief Accountant Max Lawson and his department are making their final preparations in a process of changeover and indoctrination that has been going on for almost two years.

Change Stations

One move will affect us all. From Monday 15 February, our restaurants, bars and trolleys will only accept the new decimal coins. This will avoid confusion and cut down delays in service. But to make purchases easier for the staff, Accounts Department is establishing a number of ‘change stations’ at crucial points. Old pence and threepenny pieces may be changed in multiples of 6d or 1/- for the new 2½p or 5p coins.

The change stations will be located at the following places:

Teddington

Chief Cashier’s office during normal working hours. Reception desk in the main hall during normal working hours. The ground floor of the Restaurant from 12 noon to 2 p.m. from Monday to Friday.

Euston

The Petty Cashier’s office (3rd Floor) during normal working hours. The Reception desk in the main hall during normal working hours. The cafeteria from 12 noon to 2 p.m. daily from Monday to Friday.

Hanworth

Mrs. Luccarini will change old pence for new during normal working hours.

Thames to screen next moon walk

Apollo 14 is due to land on the moon on the morning of Friday 5 February, and the astronauts will attempt a moon walk that afternoon. The team at ITN Moonbase will be Alastair Burnet, Peter Fairley, Paul Haney, Dr. Robert Jastrow, Head of the U.S. Institute of Space Studies, and Sqdn./Ldr. Gordon Sharp, of the Institute of Aviation Medicine at RAF Farnborough. Robert Hargreaves will be at Houston Space Centre in America.

Thames will be screening the moonlanding at 8.00 am and the moon walk at 2.30 pm and 6.30 pm. During these transmissions viewers will be able to telephone the ITN Moonbase on a special hot-line to the studio to have their questions answered on-air by experts.

Look-In off to good start

The first two issues of Look-in, the new Junior TV Times which went on sale earlier this month, were a virtual sellout. Alan Fennell, the new paper’s editor, reports preliminary figures of 470,000 and 435,000 for numbers one and two respectively. Both issues were supported with strong Magpie give-aways (cardboard models of the studio and production team). Each issue will feature Magpie, and Wreckers at Deadeye is being serialised during the first six weeks.

Thames on SFTA short-list

Magpie, The Benny Hill Show, Writer’s Workshop and producer Reg Collin have all reached the short-list of nominations for the 1970 Society of Film and Television Arts Awards.

Benny Hill has been short-listed for the Light Entertainment award; Magpie and Writer’s Workshop as two of four official ITV entries for the Rediffusion Star Award for children’s programmes, and Callan producer Reg Collin for the Producer/Director Production Award. This is the second year running that both Magpie and Reg Collin have reached the finals in their respective categories. The awards will remain a secret until 4 March when the winners will be announced at an Awards Ball at the Royal Albert Hall.

Top Ten and Twenty

The JICTAR figures for the first two weeks of the new year (ending 17 January) show that Granada jumped ahead of Thames into second place – a position which we occupied throughout the last 9 weeks of 1970. Top Twenty positions to date are: BBC with 11 programmes, Granada 9, Thames 7, ITN 6, Yorkshire 5 and LWT 3.

In London we maintained our lead in the list of the Top Ten programmes screened in the area (Thames 13, LWT and BBC 7 each), but lost our lead to the BBC in the table of the top ten originated programmes. Figures for this chart were: BBC with 7 places, LWT 6 and Thames 5.

In the Top Twenty chart for week ending 17 January, This Is Your Life was the highest Thames entry (equal third with 7-85 million network homes). Man At The Top leapt up 9 places from the previous week to 9 with 7.35 million homes and Shadows Of Fear entered the chart for the first time at 12 with 7.10 million homes.

Emergency measures for GPO strike

Special arrangements during the postal strike have been made by Teddington and Hanworth Manager Ken Pike. They include special delivery to all ITA premises and stations, all ITV companies and the Independent Television Companies Association, all advertising agencies, Post Office Telecommunications HQ and the Post Office Tower, Rediffusion Television and EMI. Urgent mail for overseas is also being accepted.

The company’s despatch riders are continuing to carry out their normal duties and in addition are also delivering important letters which would normally go by post.

All other post is being held by the secretaries in each department, to avoid a pile-up in the Post Room.

Postal Supervisor Bert Short and Travel Officer Don Heaven report “no panic and no problems to date.”

Previews at NFT2

After almost two years of research and filming, Till I End My Song will be seen on the network at 9.00 pm on Tuesday 16 February. It will be previewed at the National Film Theatre’s No. 2 cinema on 11 February. Written and produced by Jeremy Isaacs and directed by David Gill, this documentary records the sights and sounds of the Thames. It looks at the varied activities of the people whose lives centre around the river – from swan-upping to garbage disposal. It is the first Thames programme to be shown in the new peak time documentary slot of 9.00 pm.

Early in March the exciting Thames documentary exclusive on the ascent of Annapurna’s south face will also be previewed at NFT2. The programme, The Hardest Way Up, will be seen on the network on 16 March at 9.00 pm.

New officers sought for Club Committee

The Annual General Meeting and Elections of the Club will be held on Monday 1 February at 6.30 pm in the Teddington restaurant. Neither Club Chairman Ron Walsby nor Secretary Bernard Burke are standing for re-election. Urgent nominations are required for these posts and the rest of the committee.

The Club Committee is responsible for the Club bars (opening hours, service, prices, catering, etc.) and various social activities during the year. It is important therefore that as many as possible vote at Monday’s AGM.

The post Newsletter – 29 January 1971 appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.

Most of these people will be invisible to us. They don’t get their names in the end credits of the programmes. They don’t get a namecheck on air. We don’t see them on screen. We don’t even see or hear what they’ve produced to make the programme appear. Yet they’re all vital.

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At Thames in 1970 there’s a group of people absolutely vital to making television happen for the viewer and yet utterly invisible: the transmission control staff and the technicians that work with them. Everybody has a vital job to do, from the person lining up the reels of commercials to the person with a stopwatch seeing what space is available for promotions and announcements. They pool this information and another vital, invisible specialist types it up on special paper and has it duplicated using a manual Gestetner machine, turning the handle to produce each copy, then collating them, stapling them and distributing them to dozens of people in the Euston studios – and sending copies to the head of presentation of each of the other ITV companies (and ITN) so that everybody knows what everybody else is doing.

These presentation schedules, also known as routine sheets, are then used by the transmission controllers and the continuity announcers to run each evening’s broadcasts to the second, from starting the station up at 2.44pm (and 31 seconds) through to the epilogue, closing announcement, national anthem and “don’t forget to switch off your set” starting at 11.59pm (and 50 seconds).

These routine sheets are complicated and technical, but tell us an amazing amount of useful detail of what happened on a specific day.

On Thursday 26 March 1970, Roger Rowe was the transmission controller at Euston. With him that day were Sheila Kennedy and Philip Elsmore splitting the continuity announcing job between them. If there are problems to do with the commercials – one to be pulled or one to be added – then Mr G. Smith is in the building until midnight to manage the process. Mrs Pam Durrant is available on extension 651 if the press office is required – if someone says a rude word on Today or if tomorrow’s newspapers could run with something that Thames has put out. At home but still on call is Transdiffusion’s Honorary President, Geoffrey Lugg, available on 01 977 4053, ready in case a programme becomes unavailable or disaster strikes.

The day starts at 14Hours.44Mins.31Secs exactly with the fade up of the ITA ‘flag’ caption. On the Brighter Side and Pizzicato Rockalong by Johnny Hawksworth play. At 14.48.02, Philip Elsmore – on tape – says “This is Thames Television, operating on the London transmitters of the Independent Television Authority.” Then more Hawksworth – Salute to Thames (known as the March internally) and we’re into Sheila Kennedy saying hello at 14.49.50. She has exactly ten seconds to welcome the viewers to Thames and throw forward to a repeat of Mad Movies.

There’s more time available after the programme ends at 15.14.05 with 5 seconds of the From THAMES slide. 50 seconds are given to her here, allowing time for her to run through the early evening’s programmes before the 7-second Thames ident at 15.14.53 and the Outside Broadcast. This OB is also being taken by Harlech, which may explain why the Thames ident is being run before the programme start rather than as part of it – it’s allowing the Wales and West company to not show it. Although quite why is in itself a mystery.

We’re back to the announcer’s booth at 16.16.30 for 15 seconds and a “Childrens Opening” – billed as being the announcer, so it’s Sheila Kennedy again and not some special ident or title sequence. The next programme is from Yorkshire Television in Leeds, coming down the GPO co-axial cable and being taken by Thames, Granada, Westward, Grampian, Channel and Southern.

Our first advert break of the day occurs after Diane’s Magic Theatre ends at 16.27.55. It’s for Mackintosh’s Quality Street – on black and white – followed by Findus Fish Portions in colour. This is a feature of the time – less than 6 months into colour on the main ITV regions – with the advertisements unselfconsciously swinging back and forth between colour and black and white. The ITV companies were not permitted to charge more for handling colour advertising, so had little incentive to push the advertising agencies into switching. Long-running campaigns for major brands had been prepared in black and white up to two years ago, were expensive to make, and there was little incentive for companies to remake them in colour – an expensive business.

There’s no accounting for which adverts are in colour and which are not. Mars, one of the world’s largest advertisers, is firmly in black and white throughout the evening across most of its brands – Pedigree Chum, Mars bars, Marathon, and Twix all getting a plug before 7pm without a hint of colour anywhere (Revels, however, are in colour). But smaller brands like Brolac paint and Meakin Pottery are in colour. Even brands that would benefit from colour in their commercials – ICI’s Dulux Paint – are in monochrome, yet followed by a colour commercial for Filigree Curtains (who?).

Skipping forward, Magpie at 17.19.00 is going out to the entire network except ‘HAR 2’. This is the former Teledu Cymru, the Welsh- and English-language service of Harlech – ‘HAR 1’ is the former TWW, the Harlech General Service for Western England and South Wales in English alone. Clearly Harlech Wales is putting out a children’s programme in Welsh in that part of its dual contract area.

The ITN news is at 17.50.00, and is being routed through Thames facilities in Euston – which is why this slot (later the 5.45pm and 5.40pm ITN programmes) was always the best chance of glimpsing the Thames clock or hearing part of a Thames announcement when your regional company was a tad early into the news (or Thames was a tad late). It also allows Thames to network at 30 second promotion for This Week after the news finishes – but the other companies need to get out at precisely 18.01.30 or they’ll be showing the Thames weather.

Everything now is locally produced at Thames until 20.59.00, when ITN gets 30 seconds to plug tonight’s News at Ten. This is done in a complicated way – ITN’s live promo comes in to Thames and is then sent on the standby line (not the over-the-air line; ATV had bought a second private direct line between Foley Street in London and Aston in Birmingham from the GPO back when they had two ITV contracts) to ATV to network. ATV then keeps control of the network for the next programme, except for Grampian, who opt-out for a local programme.

The ATV programme is a repeat of The Jimmy Tarbuck Show, at 20.59.30. Pre-publicity and the TVTimes have boasted that this is in colour. It isn’t, and an announcement will need to be made to apologise. It looks like that has been left to ATV to do, meaning that the apology for it not being in colour will go out across the network – the majority of which is still in black and white only anyway.

More networking shenanigans at 21.59.15, as Granada plugs Cinema to the network, but does it by sending the trail down the line to Thames to distribute to the network. Since both of the Harlech regions, and Grampian, Southern and Tyne Tees, are opting out of Cinema, their local continuity will have to run something in its place; they, and all the other regions, are going to have to fill the next 15 seconds as well, as Thames is doing its standard “station identification” at this point, a full 7-second ident held for a further 7 seconds and Philip Elsmore saying something like “This is Thames, from London. And now, the ITN News at Ten.”

At the end of the long run of commercials starting at 22.29.05, Philip Elsmore does what is in effect a leftover practice from the 1950s – a ‘clock spot’. These were cheap 7-second plugs for a product done over the station clock (or with the clock either side and a slide in-between) read by the duty announcer but were deplored by the Independent Television Authority as it looked like the station itself was being sponsored by the product in question. All that’s left of them by 1970 is the announcer coming in live at the end of a standard commercial break and doing a plug over a slide – in this case for this week’s TVTimes.

Once Cinema has run – direct to the participating network from Granada – the rest of the evening is all locally originated. The main programme is NBC’s I Spy, starring Robert Culp. The episode number 21 from season 3, previously shown on NBC in the States on 4 March 1968. That’s followed by the epilogue, 8 minutes and 7 seconds long, at 23.59.50, on videotape, and then the closedown.

The closedown isn’t given any timings, and aficionados of this particular sub-genre of presentation will know how this time was used – informally, with the announcer chatting about what we saw tonight and what we can see tomorrow, possibly thanking the transmission crew and sometimes naming the transmission controller. The national anthem is played, there’s a period of silence, and then the announcer gently fades his mic back up, reminds us to switch off our sets, and wishes us a good night again.

And the day is done.

The post Far from routine appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.

Designers get together

One of those joint conferences between ourselves and the BBC in which rivalry is forgotten for a while has recently taken place at Teddington. Members of the Guild of Heads of Television Design accepted the invitation of Patrick Downing to a meeting at Teddington on 7 October to discuss points of interest and mutual problems within the industry and to exchange ideas.

(Patrick is founding chairman of the Guild which came into being at the beginning of this year).

Those present were: Michael Yates, Head of Design, London Weekend; Peter Alexander, Head of Design, Scottish Television; Richard Levin, Head of Design Services, BBC; John Dilly, Head of Design, Southern; Eric Briers, Head of Design, Tyne Tees; Geoffrey Martin, Head of Design, Yorkshire; Richard Greenough, Head of Visual Services, ATV; Peter Roden, Head of Scenic Design, ATV; Alpho O’Reilly, Head of Design, Radio Telefis Eireann; Malcolm Beatson, Head of Design, ITN; Peter Ash, Head of Design, Granada; Clifford Hatts, Head of Scenic Design, BBC.

An added reason for the meeting was that it was the last opportunity all the members had for a meeting with Richard Levin, before his retirement. After the meeting Patrick on behalf of Thames, entertained members of the Guild to dinner on the MV Iris.

No floods

The time of extreme flood danger from the Thames early this month has now come and gone without the river bursting its banks – though some newspaper reports just before the danger time talked of “the gravest threat of floods in one hundred years”. Sighs of relief everywhere – including Thames studios at Teddington where the Admin Department had taken precautions.

Inevitably there is a sense of anticlimax and some people have wondered: was there unnecessary panic? As far as Thames was concerned there certainly was not. Flooding on a serious scale could have occurred. That it did not was due to a combination of three lucky factors: little rain to swell the rivers; very high barometric pressure; and a wind blowing against the tide.

Report — Munich

Director Jolyon Wimhurst, reporter John Morgan and a Report film team have just returned from Munich where they were completing the new dramatised documentary on Munich which will be screened in the Spring of 1972. Munich, the Bavarian capital, has always had a weakness for extravagance and a reputation for laissez-faire. This attitude gave birth to artistic and political excesses – from its Baroque architecture to revolutionary ideas, culminated by the rise of Adolf Hitler. In the year of the Munich Olympics Report tells the story of the city from the beginning of the 18th century to the present day.

EMI contract

EMI Electronics has won a major television equipment contract worth almost £200,000 to re-equip a Belgian television studio for colour broadcasting. The contract, which includes the first export order for the company’s new ‘2005’ three-tube colour cameras, is for the replacement of existing EMI monochrome equipment at the Brussels studio of Belgium Radio Television’s Flemish Service.

Still winning

As already reported in the Newsletter, the Thames Vauxhall Firenza at its very first appearance at a race meeting scored two out-right wins and broke the class record twice. The car continued its winning ways on its second outing at Inglistone on 10 October. It won the first saloon car race of the day, after Gerry Marshall had clocked the fastest lap in practice. Incidently the win was achieved despite the fact that the opposition was “formidable” to quote Bill Blydenstein. Before the final saloon car race (in which the Firenza was entered) the organisers gave each of the previous race winners a lap of honour. The unfortunate result of this was that the Firenza’s engine oiled up its plugs and although the plugs were changed the car went on three cylinders again during the race and finished seventh overall. But for the lap of honour it might well have come away with a double victory again.

U.S. Rivals

“Variety”, the U.S.-published, international show business magazine has a unique vocabulary. For those of us who don’t see it regularly, the following review of Rivals of Sherlock Holmes may be amusing:

Thames TV, the London independent, has whipped up a promising ITV network series meant to redress at least some of the balance with regard to the great detectives of Edwardian fiction. Hence the overall intriguing handle for this series of 13 hour long colorfilm mellers which has already sold in a number of off-shore markets.

The initialer featured John Neville as a smoothie forsenic scientist – a bit too smooth, in fact, since Philip Mackie’s script (from an Austin Freeman story) portrayed the hero as a man of immaculate gee-whiz intellect as well as urbanity. It was, in short, no contest from the start in this tale of a brothel murder. Never mind the plot cliches – the producers couldn’t be faulted for being faithful to the original text in that respect. And include among the cliches a compliment to the Baker St. hot-shot, in that Neville, too, trailed a Watson-type sidekick.

The seg was, however, nicely paced and sharply cast, and the Edwardian flavor came across effectively if economically. In notable support of Neville were James Cossins as his acolyte, Terence Rigby, Bernard Archard, Paul Darrow and, in particular, Eve Pearce as the madame-cum-innocent-landlady.

Fast Workers

Records were broken at Euston on 29 September to get a Daily Express ad on screen in the shortest possible time. The story began at 8.45 pm, when advertising duty officer Tony Clemens received a call from the Express asking if we had a spot available that night. We hadn’t, but one was cleared at 9.58 pm. By 9.45 pm, the script and artwork were ready and cleared, and were taken to Presentation for taping, and the commercial duly went out one hour and ten minutes after receipt of the first enquiry. John Robertson, the Publicity Manager of the Express, came to see the transmission, and expressed his gratitude for the co-operation we had given his organisation at such short notice.

Armchair for Armchair

There’s a neat compliment for the Armchair Theatre series in a glossy magazine campaign by Parker-Knoll at the moment for their Buccaneer suite of chairs. The ad shows three photographs of a man watching telly while sitting on a Buccaneer armchair. The captions read: “It’s an armchair for ‘Armchair Theatre’”…, “A knees-up for ‘Come Dancing'”…, “And an escape from the fifth repeat of the ‘Wooden Horse’”… Fortunately for our reputation the man is sitting up keen, alert and vigilant for “Armchair Theatre”; very relaxed for “Come Dancing” and sound asleep for the “Wooden Horse”.

Out in front

At the end of the first 39 weeks of 1971, Thames has established a clear lead over the BBC and all other ITV programme companies in numbers of programmes in both the Network Top Twenty, and the London Top Ten. Up to 3 October, we had had 169 programmes in the Top Twenty (21-5 per cent) compared to Granada’s 153 programmes (19 4 per cent) and the BBC’s 149 programmes (19 0 per cent). In the London Top Ten we had screened 244 programmes (55-8 per cent) and originated 127 programmes (29 1 per cent). Full tables:

Network Top Twenty

TOTAL	785	100
THAMES	169	21.5
GRANADA	153	19.4
BBC	149	19.0
ITN	126	16.1
YORKSHIRE	80	10.2
ATV	53	6.8
LWT	51	6.5
OTHER ITV	4	0.5

London Top Ten Screened

TOTAL	437	100
THAMES	244	55.8
BBC	112	25.6
LWT	81	18.6

London Top Ten Originated

TOTAL	437	100
THAMES	127	29.1
BBC	112	25.6
GRANADA	66	15.1
LWT	57	13.0
ITN	42	9.6
YORKSHIRE	21	4.8
ATV	11	2.5
OTHER ITV	1	0.2

Booked?

No, not quite! Ciss Stapleton, lady cleaner with Thames, gets a big smile from the local traffic warden, Ciss had just collected her new trolley from Bob Hurley, so she decided to invest in ‘L’ plates until she feels ‘qualified’. Ciss, by the way, has been with Rediffusion and Thames for 15 years.

The post Newsletter – 22 October 1971 appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.

This feature is about ‘Curse of the Mummy’ – about the people who produced it and the work entailed by each department.

The Producer

The Producer of this particular series of ‘Mystery and Imagination’ is Reginald Collin. He is the man who has overall responsibility for the entire series.

At the start of a production, the Producer discusses the play with the Director and then remains available from the outset for consultation on all matters from interpretation to budgets and casting. It is the Producer who has the last word on any decision and it is the Producer who carries the can if any of these decisions prove to be misguided.

When the Director has done his job and the play is ready to be recorded, the Producer sits in the Control Box and, with the Story Editor, makes notes for the benefit of the Director, who is usually pleased at this stage to have comments from another practical television man on aspects of the production he may have missed.

Reginald Collin is very pleased with this particular combination of plays for ‘Mystery and Imagination’. ‘Curse of the Mummy’, ‘Sweeney Todd’, which he directed as well as produced and ‘The Suicide Club’, apart from being exceptionally well written, all have the same basic underlying theme in that they concern people who turn out to be not quite what they seem to be. This gives the series as a wholesome kind of unity.

The Director

Before describing the function of a Director – in this case Guy Verney, it may be useful to explain the difference between a Director and a Producer. The Producer is the man in charge of the programme and the Director is the man, who, under the Producer’s supervision, controls the cameras and the people taking part, i.e. selects the camera shots, the positioning of the actors, their interpretation of the script and the special effects necessary.

Special effects were an important and difficult feature of ‘Curse of the Mummy’. For example, there were scenes where no specific activity was taking place but the illusion had to be created that an evil, eerie kind of atmosphere was pervading a room. The difficulty lay in the fact that there was no tangible way of suggesting this. Finally, after consultation with the Designer, they hit on the solution of photographing, slightly out of focus, some tightly crumpled cellophane. This was then recorded on video tape, played back and gently superimposed over the scene. The result was a silver-mottled effect that kept appearing and disappearing.

This evil atmosphere was supposed to emanate from a mummified cat. To convey this, a special model of the cat was made through which smoke could be piped. Using the vision mixer, a green effect was superimposed over the smoke, which helped to intensify the suggestion of something evil entering the room.

The essence of a well directed play is good teamwork. Casting, design, technical people must all work well together as a team. Once that relationship has been established any production is guaranteed success.

The Story Editor

When a Producer has chosen a theme, the Story Editor must find a play to convey it. ‘Curse of the Mummy’, which is based on Bram Stoker’s story, ‘Jewel of the Seven Stars’, was Brian Brooke’s responsibility.

I spend a lot of my time saying “No” to writers, practising or would-be. Occasionally I allow myself a cautious “Maybe… – the jubilant “Yes!”, and the jubilation is heart-felt, believe me, is an historic rarity. I can’t, however, recall many occasions when my response has been a genuinely puzzled “Eh…?” But puzzled “Eh…?” it was, when John Russell Taylor suggested ‘Jewel of the Seven Stars’ as a follow-up to his highly successful dramatization of Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’.

‘Jewel’ is the most neglected product of Stoker’s teaming imagination (if one excludes his first work in a rather different vein ‘The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland’) I’d never even heard of it, to my lasting shame.

I read it, all 250 microscopically printed pages of it, and, amid a welter of plot and counter-plot involving an army of characters, numerous exotic locations, flash-backs historical and otherwise, dream sequences, etc., began to see what John was driving at. So the writer – story editor creative process began i.e. we spent a lot of time shouting at each other.

When the smoke of creative battle cleared the next step was obvious. John retired, regrouped and reappeared clutching a synopsis. A critic by profession, his great advantage, where a story editor is concerned, is his sense of dramatic structure. His synopsis was a near miracle of time-scale reduction, plot-pointing. location elimination and character amalgamation. Wisely he had followed some, if not all, of my advice – or so I shall continue to insist in the teeth of all opposition.

Then came The Lull; a period only too familiar to every story editor: the first draft was awaiting… Resisting, as Mr Stoker would say, “with every fibre of my being” almost hourly temptations to phone him in his Welsh retreat on the most trivial of pretexts to remind him of “this” or suggest “that”, I waited.

Patience, faith, fortitude, all were rewarded. Our final rehearsal script scarcely differed at all from John’s first draft. We – and I know I speak for Reg Collin, Producer, and Guy Verney, Director, as well as myself – were delighted. I hope you and our viewers will share our enthusiasm.

The Designer

Mike Hall explains some of the problems of designing for Television melodrama.

In the past few years, many attempts have been made – some successful and some not – to reproduce sets for Fort Knox, the Oval Cricket Ground, the Eiffel Tower, the Front Line Trenches and so on. Some of these sets, when written in scripts, are laughable but when analysed on paper, by a Director and Designer, their dexterity enables them to visualise ways of creating the required effect. Alternatively they can, to coin a phrase, “shoot it tight” or decide “Let’s say it happens at night and we won’t see it!”

‘2001’, a masterpiece of illusion and cinematic art, had the problem, amongst many, of building a two-hundred foot high revolving Hilton. “Surely this was an illusion – photographic tricks”, you say. Not so – they built a two-hundred foot high revolving Hilton.

Melodrama on Television has to face up to these problems. The public must surely have rumbled now, the commonplace dodge of shooting it tight or using back-projection. If one elects to do a melodrama for Television, then the gigantic wide shot i.e. the Mummy’s Tomb, cannot be achieved by trickery. The tomb has to be built for real as the importance of the large dramatic shot is one of the underlying visuals in a melodramatic piece. The shot of Frankenstein standing on top of the mountain, Silas sitting in his large drawing-room, Dracula appearing in the church – are all visuals that cannot be shortcut. The sets for these sort of shots must be real, dramatic and overpowering. This is the demand, basically, for a Set Designer working with melodrama. His greatest challenger is the horror feature film and he has to create designs for Television that will not look like a poor man’s version, despite the fact he is working with a much smaller budget. If we are to compete with the horror feature film, huge sets are essential.

The huge set for the Mummy’s Tomb produces all the required effects. It looks both dramatic and authentic. The authenticity was acquired by studying colour photographs in magazines, purchasing books and articles on Egyptology and consulting an authority at the British Museum about weapons, lamps and other objects that were typical of the period.

The Costume Supervisor

All the costumes for ‘Curse of the Mummy’ were designed by Jill Silverside.

One of the most interesting designs is the rather spectacular and elaborate Headdress worn by Queen Tera. This evolved from visits Jill made to the British Museum and research from various books on Egyptology. The design had to combine the symbols for both Upper and Lower Egypt and, of course, be wearable in both a standing and prone position, which entailed having the head-dress and collar made in sections.

To cut down on bandaging time for the mummy, Jill decided to make a cast of Isobel Black’s figure. She was enclosed in a tube of mutton cloth and then brown sticky-tape was used to build up the cast. The back was cut away so that Isobel could get out and, after trimming, this shape was used to support the wrappings. An incidental advantage, apart from speeding up the dressing, was that it also eliminated all signs of breathing.

All the Egyptian costumes were made in Wardrobe by Jill. Several of these had to be transparent. After testing many materials for transparency in front of the colour cameras, Jill decided that the one which produced the nearest effect to the original and was most acceptable to the cameras, was pure silk chiffon, which had to be sunray pleated.

It is easy to see, by the original designs illustrating this page, that Jill’s costumes look authentic, dramatic and add as much credibility to the theme of the play as the performance of the actors who wear them.

The Production Assistant

If a Drama PA was photographed in a setting that adequately conveyed the nature of her work, she would probably be seen surrounded by a huge mound of lists, schedules, memos, scripts, tranquilisers and overworked typewriters.

From the start of rehearsals for ‘Curse of the Mummy’ through to camera-script stage, Betty Kenworthy’s job was mainly one of liaison i.e. making sure that everything murmured at odd moments by the Director, finally reached the people who needed to know about it. During the rehearsal week, Betty talked to the Graphic Artist about the style of lettering to be used, ordered captions and other graphic work; passed on to Props the Designers’ Prop List plus the Stage Manager’s additional props; ordered all practical water, gas or electrical requirements; ordered technical requirements i.e. cameras, microphones and extra lights; arranged dressing rooms for artistes; kept Wardrobe and Make-up closely informed of any changes or new ideas; booked recording and dubbing sessions; ordered effects and music and re-typed altered pages of script, changed at rehearsals.

Once in the Control Room, during camera rehearsal, the P.A. follows the blocking of shots – confirming over the microphone, the camera and shot number; times the production; rolls in film or VTR inserts and generally tries to keep ahead of the Director’s needs.

When the play is recorded, payment of artistes must be organised; lists compiled of all music, film, photographs or anything else used and a coherent editing script made up for editing and dubbing sessions. After timing the final edited version of the play, all the relevant information is sent to Transmission Control and the P.A. must start from the beginning The First Rehearsal, again on the next script!

The Casting Director

“A successful Casting Director must have a genuine knowledge of, and feeling for actors – he must know their work and know them.”

One such man is Keith Andrews, who was Casting Director for ‘Curse of the Mummy’.

A Casting Director is involved very much at the beginning of any production, when ideas are exchanged with the Producer and the Director about which actors seem right for the various roles. As soon as a list of suggestions is compiled, the Casting Director rings the agents of the actors concerned to check their availability. If the first name on the list is not available, the second name on the list is tried and eventually a complete cast is assembled. Apart from the ‘rightness’ of a particular actor for the part, choice is largely governed by budget and the availability of the people selected.

From a casting point of view, ‘Mystery and Imagination’ is a particularly fascinating series. The cast have to play extremely intriguing characters in great depth. Faces are very important if the actor is to convey the sinister quality of the plays convincingly. Even the extras, who are normally supplied by reliable agencies, must be chosen carefully. A scene set in an inn, for example, which requires a dozen extras, can only have the right atmosphere conveyed if the agency produces people of the right age, with the required physical characteristics. A batch of serene, genteel ladies, who look like left-overs from a vicar’s tea-party, are unlikely to evoke the same impression of debauched revelry as effectively, say, as a group of broken-nosed ruffians of the type Hogarth could have painted.

Casting ‘Curse of the Mummy’ was relatively simple as we were lucky enough to get all the actors we specifically wanted. There were no awkward parts to cast, as in ‘The Suicide Club’, which requires “a hunched-back dwarf, who plays the violin”.

Choosing Isobel Black to play Queen Tera was Guy Verney’s idea and the decision was unanimously approved. She read the script, liked it and agreed to play the role.

When you eventually see the play and observe the faces of the actors it should be easy to see why each one was an ideal choice for each part.

Credits

In such a limited space it is impossible to cover every aspect of a production and several areas of work have not been mentioned. The technical side of the play was the responsibility of Peter Howell, Cameras; Andy Andrews, Lighting; Ron Ferris, Sound and Del Randell, Technical Supervisor. Carol Bright supervised Make-up, the Floor Manager was Denver Thornton and the Stage Manager, Betty Crowe.

The post Curse of the Mummy appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.

‘Know what a lens is lad?’

‘Er, yes.’

‘Ever seen a television camera before?’

‘Er, I think so.’

‘Right. You start first thing in the morning.’

An occasional young cameraman might conceivably have started his career in television like this fifteen or twenty years ago. Recruitment into the industry then was sometimes a haphazard and irregular affair and even once in the job formalised training was not always available – you often learned as you went along.

Things today are very different. The video communications business has become a large and sophisticated industry. In addition to the broadcasting organisations and the host of small, private film and TV companies, virtually every university, technical college and art school as well as most of the larger education authorities have full-scale television systems in operation; the industry’s techniques and equipment have become highly advanced. Against such a background it was inevitable that regularised, planned training programmes, college courses and recruitment schemes should have sprung up. Young hopefuls entering the industry today will have to have at least some qualifications under their belts before they start and then after joining will more than likely embark on a planned course of learning and instruction.

In Independent Television, a number of the larger companies have instituted such schemes for all their recruitment and staff training. One company to have done this is Thames Television in London. Its training scheme began in its present form some three or four years ago and is still developing. Thames has set up a special Training Department with its own staff and its own Training Centre at Teddington studios. The centre includes a library of books, tapes and cassettes, a study area and special facilities which can be used as a lecture room, viewing room or television studio. The scheme has a number of sides to its operation and is not designed just for technical staff. There are courses for, among others, secretaries, programme directors and production assistants as well as staff from the business and administration sides. Recruits from both inside and outside the industry find they have a large number of courses available to them.

One of the most comprehensive training courses Thames undertake is the Technical Training Scheme. Student trainees in camera and sound work, operational engineering, film and other technical fields take one-year courses which include a period in the training centre followed by a period as operational trainees. The courses are devised on a modular basis covering a wide number of areas and each trainee follows the full course through. They begin to specialise during the operational phase and as vacancies occur are progressively absorbed into the company. The courses include lectures, demonstrations, visits and production projects, and a number of days a week working in a small closed-circuit studio and control room.

On the production side there are training programmes for production assistants and trainee directors, the latter spending most of their time working closely with other directors but also undertaking several weeks of concentrated instruction. In addition there are special courses for vision mixers, graphics department trainees, engineers specialising in quality control and digital techniques, plus external courses for VTR operations, lighting control, 16mm. film production and colour photography.

As well as the production and engineering courses, there are those catering for people specialising in the business and administration sides. There is a trainee secretaries’ course for recruits joining from secretarial college, and Thames’ trainee manager scheme covers most aspects of management and business administration. Short specialist courses for established managers cover labour relations, interviewing methods and industrial safety.

Another feature of the Thames approach to recruitment and training is the induction course. All new people joining the company go on a one-day induction course which includes a welcome from an executive director and tours of the Teddington and Euston centres as well as a look at some of Thames’ programmes and talks with personnel and welfare staff.

Yet another valuable and in some ways novel part of the overall scheme is the regular studio training sessions Thames organises for all its employees. These sessions are specially designed to give staff a chance

to do jobs they,would not normally do and so as well as being of great value they are needless to say great fun too. For some staff the sessions present a good opportunity to see if they really would like to be a cameraman or production assistant; others are able to test their prowess at such work as sound balancing, which a boom operator for example would not normally be able to do. Others find their experience usefully broadened by having to work in unfamiliar conditions and many of course appreciate the chance to sense the excitement of programme making. Anyone in the company from the newest recruit to the most established executive can apply to take part. An obvious advantage of the studio sessions is that they prove to some people that they will never make a cameraman, production assistant or whatever else it was they’d had ambitions for!

The broad thinking behind the entire scheme is one of fostering and developing talent. Young people coming into the industry are given the opportunity of receiving high quality training designed to suit specifically their talents. The right type of training must be given in the right areas. Care is taken not to deny job opportunities to those already in the industry, and those whose skills and abilities have been overtaken by technological change are offered re-training. The twin issues at stake in training are the short-term needs of individuals and the long-term needs of the industry.

The post So You Want to Work in Television… appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.

Thames Television is London’s major ITV station, with headquarters and studios in the heart of the city on the Euston Road, with the main multi-studio complex sited fifteen miles away, on a bend of the river Thames at Teddington.

Our programmes cover the whole range of modern television, from Botanic Man to Edward and Mrs Simpson, Hazell and the Kenny Everett Video Show.

Our success as a medium for advertising is directly linked to the quality of our programmes. Thames’ plans for the future include a four-part film series of Quatermass, starring Sir John Mills as the famous professor; Love in a Cold Climate, a dramatisation of Nancy Mitford’s best-selling novel; Hollywood our celebration of the silent film; and new programmes from top-class entertainers like Max Bygraves and Morecambe and Wise.

Filming entirely on location, our subsidiary Euston Films produces taut drama series like The Sweeney and the six-part serial Out, starring Tom Bell.

Thames has an unrivalled reputation for documentary films like Palestine, our three-part history of the birth of Israel, while each week TV Eye brings back film of a major news story from all over the world. We’re proud to say that our programmes equal the best in the world, having won all the major international prizes, including America’s coveted Emmy award. Thames is the only company to have won the Prix Italia four times, including victories in all three categories.

As London’s weekday station, Thames has a special responsibility to viewers in the London area. Since September 1978 we have seen the establishment of a comprehensive local news service for London. Andrew Gardner, Rita Carter and Robert Southgate introduce the main daily local news programme at six o’clock, which is supported by bulletins at lunch-time and late in the evening. In addition, the weekly half-hour Thames Report, looks in depth at the most important story of the week in London. A considerable investment in personnel and equipment has made it possible to cover stories as they happen, right up until transmission – if necessary, through a live outside broadcast.

Sports coverage is also expanding with Thames Sport Roger Allison’s Friday round-up. And we’ll be providing exclusive coverage of major events in international gymnastics, while Thames will be powerfully represented in the hundred-strong ITV team for the 1980 Olympics in Moscow.

As well as being shown across the country through the ITV network, Thames programmes made for the London viewer have conquered the world.

Thames is the largest exporter of programmes to Australia, where Benny Hill, The World at War and George and Mildred have topped the ratings. In the USA, Three’s Company, which was derived from Thames’ Man about the House, was the most successful new programme in 1977/78. In Europe The Naked Civil Servant has been shown in sixteen countries and Father, Dear Father topped the ratings in Italy. Thames is making an impact with quality programmes, in more than a hundred countries all over the world.

Our chief source of revenue is the screen-time we sell to advertisers. We take no cash from the government television licence fee. Instead we provide the most influential platform for advertising in the London area.

The Thames area covers London and most of South East England, stretching from Brighton to Buckingham and Braintree, from Thanet to Oxfordshire. That area contains more than a quarter of the British people in eleven counties around London.

Thames Television Limited
306 Euston Road – London – NW1 3BB – 01-387 9494

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So how do the people who actually make children’s television programmes set about it? How do they deal with their awesome responsibility, not only to please all the adults (or at least not offend them too much) but also entertain, inform, interest and stretch the vast number of children for whom their programmes are intended?

The Children’s Department of Thames Television is the largest in ITV, supplying an average of 142½ hours of networked programmes each year. It caters for children ranging from the very young (Rainbow for the under fives) through to the 5-6 year olds (Paperplay, Issi Noho, King Wilbur III, …And Maisy Too), the 7-8 year olds (The Sooty Show, Michael Bentine’s Potty Time), the 9-12 year olds (Magpie, All Together Now), teenagers (You Must Be Joking!), and it hopes that its drama appeals to children of all ages (The Tomorrow People, The Molly Wopsies, The Feathered Serpent, Shadows, Horse In The House).

Not only is this output geared across a wide age range, but the types of programme are also immensely varied. Sue Turner, Thames’ Controller of Children’s Programmes comments: ‘Children are, after all, simply people who have not been alive very long. They have as much (maybe more) intelligence, imagination, enthusiasm and eagerness as adults. All they lack is experience (and the prejudices that often come with it). They are also a demanding audience – unrestrained by the social politeness of adults, they write and tell us precisely what they think of us and our programmes!’

Magpie, twice a week every week (except for a short summer break), is probably the best known of Thames’ children’s programmes. Transmitted live, Magpie aims to be an all round magazine programme, with items of topical interest for children of approximately 6-12 years. It began in 1968 with the start of Thames Television itself. Its award-winning documentaries have given it an international as well as a national reputation.

The pre-school programme Rainbow (winner of the British Academy Award for the best children’s programme in February 1975) aims to help children below school age to expand their experience of the world and the people around them. Rainbow is believed to be unique in the world, in that it began in 1974 making full length documentaries specially for the under fives. Dealing with potentially traumatic experiences for the very young child, so far ‘Rainbow goes to Hospital’ and ‘Rainbow Starts School’ have been presented and work is beginning on a ’Special’ which will deal with the arrival of a new baby.

A department of this size has plenty of opportunity to experiment. You Must Be Joking! (of which two series have now been made) was entirely written and performed by a cast of East End children, ranging in age from 11-17. It has been both hailed as a new departure in ‘access’ programming and condemned as giving children false ideas of their own importance. Following this programme, work is in hand on Pauline’s Quirkes, starring 16-year-old Pauline Quirke (known to adult audiences for her outstanding performance in Jenny Can’t Work Any Faster). This time Pauline and her friends take a swing at the remaining male chauvinist bastions in the name of girls’ lib!

Last year Thames launched a series of seven plays with a linking theme of ghostliness, under the title of Shadows. They included a play specially written by J B Priestley. The second series of Shadows, with an over-all theme of fantasy and including specially commissioned plays by such outstanding writers as Joan Aiken, Susan Cooper and Ewart Alexander, was transmitted this summer. The Molly Wopsies (transmitted in Spring 1976) was entirely shot with Thames’ small mobile outside broadcast unit on location in Henley; and this same unit is being used to shoot Horse in the House (adapted by Rosemary Anne Sisson from the book by William Corbin).

Sue Turner says her team had a great deal of fun and raised a lot of eyebrows by demonstrating that an all-action adventure series, set in ancient Mexico, could be shot entirely in Studio 2 at Teddington. The end result was The Feathered Serpent, transmitted this summer – with music specially written by David Fanshawe, sword fights and a great deal of ritual and splendour. She also hopes it helped to make viewers aware of the rich and fascinating history of pre-Columbian America.

This is a brief outline of just one Children’s Department – using film, studio and outside broadcast to make documentaries, current affairs, drama, light entertainment and comedy programmes. Did you know that children have such a wide choice of programmes available to them?

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The Design Department at Thames is one of the responsibilities of the Controller of Programme Services, whose deputy is in charge of administration for all areas of design. The Head of Design is responsible for creative control and his department is divided into four main sections each with its own supervisor.

The Department has fifteen administrators, managers and secretaries, making a total permanent staff of 112. Backing this design group are a large number of wardrobe personnel, property and scene men, carpenters, painters, drapesmen and drivers.

Creative Function

‘The television production designer’s function is creative and interpretive’ writes Patrick Downing, Head of Design at Thames Television. ‘His job is to clarify the director’s and his own impressions of a writer’s intentions into an amalgam of physical shapes and colours. He designs pictures – not sets, shapes and movement in a framework, not a series of still lifes.’

Downing believes that a designer’s work is realised by the individual and that it cannot be handed out as a brief. ‘A programme concept does not determine the designer’s approach to a problem or his method of solving that problem. It does not tell him what to do, or how to do it, just as it does not tell an actor how to interpret his role. The actor, director and designer will assimilate from a script or a programme outline their own conception of what they do and how they do it. With luck the designer will interpret the author’s and the director’s intent about fifty per cent of the time.

‘The Designer works as a contributor to the whole concept, with producers, directors, lighting cameramen, camera operators, costume designers and sound mixers. This does not mean that the designer’s work is done in conference and is therefore the combined work of all the participants. It is the total programme that is their combined work. ’

The designer will produce plans of action, shapes of scenery, and storyboards of ideas which will be considered and accepted by the director or producer with few if any modifications. There is no one solution to the realisation of a production designer’s work, in the translation from the written or spoken word to the creation of visual symbols. Given the same project, the same director, the same facilities, time, and budget, three designers would produce three entirely different solutions to a single programme concept.

The designer has to satisfy his own sense of fulfilment and the requirements of the author and director. He attempts to produce work that will create the largest possible audience, and at the same time fulfil his own sense of achievement and satisfaction.

Film/Videotape

There is little difference between television and film design except in the most minor mechanics. Film design is usually less confined in terms of locations, studio space and budgets.

Television ‘sets’ are designed to accommodate five or more electronic cameras and an infinity of variable positions and heights. Film ‘sets’ are designed to accommodate one film camera with the same number of variable positions. Television is more and more combining both videotape and film as a means of expression, and videotape is being shot and edited more and more in a filmic manner.

Certain disadvantages exist for the designer working with film: on videotape each shot can be seen on monitor screens as it happens and necessary corrections made; on film nothing can be seen until the ‘rushes’ are viewed after the film has been processed – too late for any adjustments.

A distinct advantage of working on location with film is that one starts with a real environment, and whatever may be added in the way of colour and properties, cobwebs or paint, one is building on a foundation of reality. In studio work the designer starts off with a basis of cardboard and recreates an extension of reality.

Most television designers’ work is still in a studio environment, and for non-contemporary drama this has become almost essential, since this field requires an ambience and setting that often exists only in museums, or is in reality now covered by a welter of traffic meters and television aerials.

These ‘extensions of reality’ in a television studio, a kind of synthesis of a style or a particular period are, hopefully, accepted by the viewer as ‘real’ – accepted, that is, if the designer’s and lighting director’s contribution can stand up to scrutiny. Graham Greene, reviewing a film in 1937, wrote: ‘All the actors work hard to give the illusion that the whole of life is symbolised in an Arizona filling station, but life, embarrassed by hearing itself so explicitly discussed, crept away, leaving us only with the pasteboard desert and the stunted cardboard studio trees’.

The Work Pattern

All designers work in entirely different ways and use different methods; and all television programmes make different demands upon the designer. However, the following notes describe a possible five or six week work pattern a production designer might adopt for the production of a drama made almost entirely in the studio.

The designer starts with the first draft script. The effect of this script, the knowledge of who is to direct, and the possible size of the budget, colours and determines his approach to the play. From the first script to the final recording the designer is continually changing and modifying his basic original ideas.

After he has digested the script the designer and the director meet, and argue. They achieve, hopefully, a creative rapport; and, with luck, the designer assimilates the emotional and visual needs of the director and the production. The director accepts the designer’s as yet basic visual ideas and imagery and together they translate into describable visual terms the intentions of the author.

The designer then creates rough plans, sketches, suggested camera movements, and occasionally storyboards for some particular sequence.

All the decisions the designer now takes will have a far-reaching effect on the whole production and will wholly dictate the visual ambience of the play. With his rough sketches, notes and ideas in a vague lump, the designer at this point receives from the producer a budget for the design of the production. ‘It’s never enough,’ says Patrick Downing, ‘and by tradition the designer spends an hour or two arguing about its inadequacy.’ At this point the designer has been working on the production for about ten days.

Now he starts on reference books, films, reference libraries and historical research. Of course much more time, energy, and research is needed if the play is historical than if it is one of those ‘three people in a camp apartment overlooking a London skyline’ play.

Then the director and designer climb into a car and search for film locations (most videotaped dramas have three or four minutes of filmed inserts, often lots more). This usually takes a couple of days. The designer now has a lot of vague ideas, sketches and polaroid photos of the film locations (or the exteriors that may appear on film which have to be matched in the studio interiors.)

The designer and the costume designer discuss basic colour tones, and work out a visual relationship between the sets and the costumes. A further afternoon and evening with the director polishes up the rough visuals.

Now the designer starts on a first search for major properties (props) that will play an integral part in his sets and in the production, and finds appropriate textures and architectural detailing.

For three or four days the designer is chained to a drawing board and with an assistant designer produces final plans, elevations and details which are then estimated for cost, found to be expensive, fiddled with, altered and put back again. Finally they are sent to the construction shop and the painters and carpenters start work.

The designer (or his assistant) makes a rough model – ‘or a nice finished one if he has the time and feels narcissistic,’ remarks Downing – and then he and the director, costume designer and lighting director sit round it, argue about it, and spill coffee over it. By this time the graphic designer has storyboards for titles and other graphics to be filmed on the rostrum camera. The designer and graphic designer meet and work out a cohesion between the designer’s by now more or less concrete forms and the graphic designer’s ideas. They sort out all the graphic minutiae of the programme. Shop signs, imitation passports, packaging, photographs, etc.

Thames design personnel

Production Design

	Head of Design
21	Designers
8	Assistant Designers
7	Production Buyers
2	Cost Estimators

Graphic Design

	Head of Graphics
11	Graphic Designers
5	Assistant Graphic Designers
4	Graphic Technicians
2	Photographers
6	Photographic Technicians
2	Rostrum Camera Unit

Scenic Art

	Supervising Scenic Artist
8	Scenic Artists

Costume Design

15	Costume Designers
4	Assistant Costume Designers

Another meeting takes place, this time with the lighting director to agree on a lighting style to fit the mood and texture of the production. The designer wants it dark, moody and atmospheric like a silent German movie; the lighting director wants the viewer to see the production – they compromise.

The designer and the scenic artist allocated to him get together to sort out the requirements of scenic cloths, painted perspectives, stained glass windows. The drapes department start making curtains and similar furnishings.

Then – the technical production meeting. The director, designer, lighting director, costume designer, technical supervisor, chief cameraman, sound and other technicians surround the designer’s model of the sets and discuss the relationship between cameras, actors, sound and design.

Somehow all this gets sorted out and the designer concentrates on the filming requirements: props and scenery, transport, permissions for filming. What kind of car is smashed in the action, and can it be afforded? Has permission been received to paint someone’s front door a dirty orange? How can that nasty lamp-post be disguised?

The designer stands by the director’s elbow throughout the filming period and then about ten days before the final recording date of the programme the director goes into rehearsal with the cast. The stage-manager lays out the designer’s studio plan on the rehearsal room floor with different coloured sticky tapes. And there is a first total read-through of the script with all the cast and everybody else concerned sitting round a large table. At the end of the read-through, final costume measurements are taken and the cast briefed on their basic movements and positions from the designer’s plans, sketches and models. Meanwhile the scenery is nearing completion.

For the next few days or so, the designer and the production buyer tour round and select all the properties, furniture, drapes, carpets and all the other bits and pieces that contribute to the ambience and atmosphere of the sets. Most of these are hired from specialist suppliers, although occasionally it is necessary to buy or make something specific or rare.

The point is now reached where the designer fills the role of a supervisor, covering the setting up of the sets on the studio floor and the arrangement and positioning of all the furniture and properties. The next two days or so are filled with rehearsals on the sets with cameras and actors, or rehearsing and recording in short sequences, much like traditional filming – a synthesis for the designer of all his work for the past six weeks. Actors, cameras and sound are working under the director. Between each section of videotape recording there is a period of minor adjustments, small changes of camera angle, lighting and mood, the repositioning of an actor or a vase of flowers.

Then the final videotaping of the programme. The designer sits in the control room watching five or six screens, all of which show a collage of images on which he has impressed colour, texture and form.

Television production design at its most basic is an out-of-focus scrap of wallpaper seen occasionally between the heads of two actors. At its best it is the creation of a mood, and a sequence of pictures to illuminate a story, that can make a good programme better.

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The ITA have recently announced that advertising revenue for all companies during June 1969 is down on June 1968 by £886,504 even before the present government levy of varying rates up to 47½% is deducted. Current Company policy is to conserve and not waste money. The sales functions at Teddington in no way contradict this policy. They fall into three main categories. (1) Advertisers or agents using our premises for Sales Conferences. (2) Entertaining people who may be of use to the Company. (3) Promoting Thames to advertising agencies by using slides and other visual aids accompanied by a commentary persuading them that the most profitable way of advertising is to spend money with Thames. These functions include an escorted tour of the Studios, which seems commonplace to us but is of immense interest to people outside Television.

The first example mentioned involves Thames in the provision of facilities and organising the function. The second requires organising and costs the Company a small amount of expenditure on refreshments but the possible return of attracting future clients completely justifies this. The third function is obviously more expensive and financed by our promotion budgets.

Our dealings with Qantas Airways is an excellent illustration of how we profit from these occasions. They held a reception for all the leading travel agencies on MV ‘Iris’ to celebrate the opening of their television advertising campaign with commercials featuring Warren (Alf Garnett) Mitchell. Organising this function resulted in us gaining the exclusive advertising contract, which is worth approximately £100,000 between July 1969 and February 1970.

On 30 July fourteen women connected with advertising in London and belonging to a club called Adwomen were entertained at Teddington. In the future any one of them could be in a position to influence advertising with Thames.

In conclusion it should be emphasized that our major source of income is commercials and anything which we can do to increase that revenue benefits us all.

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We were well prepared. Each car carried a survival heater, “A must”, said the locals, stressing the point with tales of motorists stranded on the prairies and frozen to death. We also had insulated underwear, gloves and socks.

Two hundred miles south of Rapid City we crossed the border of the Reservation. It was not typified by the tepees and feathered Indians depicted in Hollywood films. Pine Ridge is a shanty town of shacks, unpaved roads, garbage dumps, wrecked cars and the occasional dead, frozen dog. Inside a typical log shack one finds the walls crudely lined with newspaper or cardboard in an attempt to stop freezing winds whistling through the gaps between the logs. It is an exceptional home that has electricity to provide heat and light.

The inactivity of the town is striking. Most of the Indians are unemployed. They stroll around the reservation aimlessly, with blank expressions on their faces, or lounge in the corridors of the local government office, where they draw their welfare cheques. One thing they have in common with the whites is the American addiction to jeans, T-shirts and chewing gum. The buckskins, beads and feathers have long since been stored away in family treasure chests to be brought out as a tourist attraction in the summer.

The Indians have given up hope of getting a fair deal from the white man and it was hardly suprising that at first we were treated with great caution and suspicion. Each member of the unit had his share of public relations work to do.

It was not unusual to arrive at an Indian home ready for a day’s filming to find a note on the door: “Had to go to visit my mother today”, or to drive fifty miles to film a Pow Wow only to find the hall in darkness and to be told by a lone Indian to “try Monday, maybe we have Pow Wow then.”

We experienced a kickback of the commercially exploited Sioux on our second Reservation – the Rosebud. Henry Crowdog, a revered elder of the tribe eventually agreed to arrange a Ghost dance for us to film. After much haggling over price, a date was set. In their own time the dancers arrived announcing a “rehearsal day” for which they required “rehearsal fees”. Marshalling their forces took most of the day and the rehearsal lasted half-an-hour.

We presented ourselves hopefully early on the second day. The Indians arrived an hour later and spent two gleeful hours making each other up in the lurid colours of the Ghost Dance. After 20 minutes filming they announced a lunch break. Hadn’t they danced long enough? After all it was a 2 minute film sequence and they’d danced for more than 2 minutes! Ross assumed the title “Big Thundercloud” when he discovered that during, lunch they had washed off their make-up and couldn’t remember who had worn w hat colours…!

During this location we lived off the reservation, just over the border in Rushville, Nebraska – the heart of the Bible Belt of the Mid-West. The town is populated with the sleek, well-fed citizens of the American Dream who looked up from their malted milks only long enough to wrinkle their Conservative noses at the mention of the “tragic” Indians 20 miles away. They preferred not to discuss the problem. “We give them social security don’t we – and all they do is get drunk on it!” However, having revised their original opinion that we were hippies from California, the people of Rushville welcomed us with open arms. Some of them assumed that we constituted the whole of THAMES’ staff and were a local station. We explained that THAMES Television broadcast “coast-to-coast” in Britain and has a cast of hundreds… This, together with coming from London, England, put us in the celebrity bracket and they rallied round to give us any help we needed.

Our VIP status was somewhat shattered, however, by one of the Indians, who, at the end of the trip said: “Where is England anyway?”

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The family moved to London when her father was appointed Musical Director of the B.B.C. Many subsequent moves, especially during the war, continually interrupted her education. “I didn’t particularly care for school any way – except for end of term plays and concerts. I wanted to be an actress or musical comedy star and irritated my school friends beyond words by taking over rehearsals and bossing them unbearably.”

After taking a secretarial course, on parental advice, she joined her sister in the Near East Department of the BBC. Another sister. Hazel, was in the Variety Department and the eldest, Joan Winters, was doing several radio shows. “It was rumoured that the Board of Governors were considering changing the Corporation’s name to the Shadwell Broadcasting System!”

“As an outlet for my theatrical ambitions, I went in for amateur dramatics in a big way and also took private tuition for the L.A.M.D.A. exams. Appearances at the New Lindsey and Fortune Theatres tempted me to go fully professional but regular pay cheques and a family conference dissuaded me.”

Daphne’s first job in Television was as a Production Secretary on Children’s Programmes. “There was no training scheme. I just arrived at Lime Grove one morning, was introduced to a poor, unsuspecting Producer, who handed me a stop-watch, led me into a dark room and said, ‘You did know I had a programme today?’ I’d never been in a Television Studio in my life, let alone a gallery, and had no idea what to do. The programme was called ‘Simon, the Simple Sardine’. The only simple thing about that day was me but it led to two productive and fascinating years with BBC Television.”

Daphne joined Rediffusion Television in 1955 as Secretary to Lloyd Williams. She started directing in 1956 on Women’s Programmes under Mary Hill followed by a wide and varied career embracing almost every department – Children’s, Advertising Magazines, Light Entertainment, Drama and Outside Broadcasts. One of her most horrific memories concerns the Drama Department. “Towards the end of a ‘live’ play, confusion arose in the action. Trying to save the day, my leading lady leapt to the telephone and improvised a speech, completely forgetting we had just finished a traumatic scene about the telephone wires being cut.”

Shortly before the changeover of companies, Daphne started directing ‘Do Not Adjust Your Sets’, which won the Prix Jeunesse at the Munich Television Festival. The series gave birth to ‘Captain Fantastic’, with whose life she has been closely bonded since the start of Thames. “There is no shortage of variety in Children’s Programmes and in the last year I have also directed ‘Sexton Blake’, ‘The Paper Bag Players’, ‘Once Upon a Time’ stories, not to mention twenty-six ‘Sooty’s’. As long as there are good professional people to work with and I can continue working as a team with my crews, I shall remain happy in my work.”

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The subject is then brought on stage and Eamonn begins the show proper in front of an audience of about 150 to provide a reaction as the story unfolds and each guest makes his or her contribution to it.

Eamonn Andrews successfully hosted this series on BBC Television for many years. The series finished on BBC Television five years ago when Eamonn signed a contract with ABC Television, a contract which has carried him through to Thames Television. Throughout those five years Eamonn has received a lot of letters from viewers asking for the return of the series and suggesting people who could feature as This Is Your Life’ subjects. Says Eamonn, “I think ‘This Is Your Life’ is a very interesting project and the time is right for it to return to the screens. It isn’t a very safe programme to work on. A lot of research is involved preparing the show. You assemble the guests and then you are totally dependent on one person showing up, taking the surprise in his or her stride and agreeing to go on stage.”

In the following articles Eamonn reflects on some of his experiences during the original series, Robert Tyrrell, Producer, accounts for the series’ former success, and Nina Powell, Programme Organiser, explains how the show is put together from the early planning stage through to transmission night.

Eamonn Andrews

Eamonn Andrews has had the unique experience amongst those associated with the ‘This is Your Life’ team of having actually been one of its subjects in the original series. This situation arose when the ‘Daily Sketch’ broke the story that Stanley Matthews had been chosen for the programme. Although Matthews was on a fishing holiday at the time there was no way of ensuring that he had not seen the article. With only days left before they were due to go on the air an emergency conference was called to discuss an alternative subject. During this, unbeknown to Eamonn, Ralph Edwards walked behind his chair and indicated to the others that Eamonn would be a good choice. Hastily they got rid of Eamonn on the pretext of having to attend another meeting elsewhere and arranged to see him later. Immediately they started to research into Eamonn’s background and then told him that Freddie Mills, a friend of his, had been chosen. A dummy sports programme was arranged and Eamonn instructed to keep Mills occupied for the whole day. Mills was, of course, let into the secret and the two of them spent the entire day trying to keep a straight face, each believing that the evening programme was about the other.

One incident that almost gave the game away was when Eamonn invited Mills back to his home for dinner – Eamonn’s wife was in the process of getting ready to appear on the show and half an hour before the programme was due to begin a car arrived to take her to the studio. She had to go to the door, send the car away and then hastily concoct a story for Eamonn about who had called.

Finally, it was time for the confrontation scene. Eamonn sat beaming in the audience beside Mills anticipating with amusement the surprise awaiting his friend. Ralph Edwards walked through the audience, stopped beside Eamonn and asked him to read out the name on the book. Smiling, Eamonn looked at his friend and started to read aloud – “‘This Is Your Life’ … Eamonn Andrews!”

I asked Eamonn what his reaction was. “It was a big surprise – and a shattering experience. I’d no sooner absorbed the shock of meeting one person when the next was brought on. My entire family had been flown over from Ireland – even my Mother who’s terrified of flying. To this day I’ll never know how they persuaded her to get on a plane!”

A series such as this always provides a fund of stories about awkward or amusing incidents. They are funny on reflection but at the time one can imagine what a source of anxiety, frustration and strain on the nervous system they could cause. Eamonn recollected one incident when the subject chosen had to arrive at the Shepherd’s Bush Television Theatre. As the programme was ‘live’, timing was crucial. The subject was attending a conference nearby and at a prearranged secret signal by telephone he was to be brought to the theatre. Instead of leaving instantly, as was expected, quite a hiatus arose when the decoy said “Let’s go” and the subject decided to go to the loo first – a reaction no one had anticipated and consequently allocated no time for!

One of the most amusing subjects Eamonn ever dealt with was the actor, A. E. Mathews. Although well into his nineties he kidded Eamonn throughout the entire show. “He walked off the stage, returned, lay down on the couch and did everything he could to put me off balance.”

The best story, however, concerns Stephen Behan, father of Brendan Behan. The programme was done in Dublin as there was no way of making him leave the place. He had never been seen anywhere without his pipe and before the show began, someone had removed his overcoat, in which he kept his tobacco. A Researcher realised that he wasn’t smoking and went through his pockets looking for the tobacco. He found a white paper bag and proceeded to crawl across the stage, out of the range of the cameras, to hand the package to him. Stephen Behan was a house decorator and the Researcher was unfamiliar with that profession’s habit of carrying supplies of tea and sugar mixed together to use during tea-breaks. It was this concoction the Researcher had handed him – not tobacco, and Behan consequently filled his pipe and tried to smoke it.

In the few minutes before Eamonn is to announce to someone – ‘This is Your Life’ his reaction is one of ‘sheer terror’. “It is a terrific strain on the nerves – so many things can go wrong – the timing, the fact that they may say no, or just respond in a totally unpredictable way.”

Eamonn emphasises what every person on this team has engraved on their hearts – that the most important part is the maintenance of secrecy. “No person must suspect they have been chosen or they lose half the fun. The surprise element is an essential ingredient and no matter what the cost in terms of money or weeks of preparation, a programme is immediately cancelled if this element is lost.”

On a personal basis, Eamonn has gained much from his association with ‘This Is Your Life’. “I have seen a side of certain people that would not have been possible under any other circumstances, made many friends and enjoyed evenings that have been great socially, both during and after the show. ‘This Is Your Life’ is, I think, the only really natural television programme – nearly all the others could be done just as well on radio, in newspapers or through any other media.”

Robert Tyrrell

If you want to make your fortune, think of a better idea for a television series than ‘This Is Your Life’. Mr Howard Thomas and sundry other gentlemen will welcome you with open cheque books.

But the chances are you will fail for ‘This Is Your Life’ is probably a unique classic in the history of Television. No other show combines so much under one umbrella – surprises, drama, laughter, pathos, sheer human story-telling. Even after years off the air it still sparks off instant response from both viewers and professionals.

When we began to think of it, we tried to pull it apart and see what else we could do with it, but like the little boy with the alarm clock we discovered that it didn’t tick any more. So we’ve put the works back together the way they always were.

The big difference between our show and the BBC’s will not be in the mechanics – they’re near perfect – but in the choice of subject and the presentation. Wild horses would not drag from us the names of the subjects, because the old rule still applies. If the secret gets out to the subject in advance, we cancel the show -and nobody wants to see all those weeks of investigation go down the drain. That’s why if you overhear our conversation in Betty’s Bar (now one of our chief conference rooms) it is peppered with code names, hints, nods and winks. We don’t even tell our wives, lovers or mothers.

Apart from that the team (most of us new to Thames) are talkative enough. Jack Crawshaw and John Stapleton, late of Fleet Street, do our interviewing and report-writing; Mary McAnnally, late of BBC ‘Man Alive’, does research; Nina Powell, from Anglia Television, organises, administrates and looks after guests, while Tom Brennand and Roy Bottomley edit the scripts. Marjorie Baker directs and Margaret Thistle is PA.

Oh, and there’s a chap called Andrews comes into it somewhere…

Our moment of truth will be at 7 p.m. on Wednesday 19 November, during the first week of colour transmissions. On that day, someone will walk blinking into the lights to be told ‘This Is Your Life!’ Next week, who knows – it might even be you!

Nina Powell

The CIA, FBI, MI5, Special Branch and any similar organisation could learn a great deal from the maintenance of security by the ‘This Is Your Life’ team.

Programme Organiser, Nina Powell, plays an important role in connection with security. Because, for obvious reasons, the security of a programme of this nature is so tight, it was difficult to obtain detailed information about what goes on behind the scenes. However, after knocking three times, asking for Nina, inventing a password and swearing on oath that my great-greatgrandfather was not a ‘Commie’ or in any way connected with the ‘other’ channel, I was eventually allowed into their inner sanctum and given an outline of how the team operates.

All planning starts with a regular Thursday meeting in the Board Room behind locked doors, having previously ascertained that the room has not been bugged and any unwanted intruder has been removed from under the table. At the meeting possible subjects are discussed with emphasis placed on choosing a balanced selection of people, i.e. they don’t do ten shows on pop singers, followed by ten shows on actors, followed by ten shows on comedians. When a possible subject has been chosen as much information as possible is obtained from back issues of newspapers by Mary McAnnally. From these she compiles a skeleton biography. Then the Investigators take over and without referring to the programme by name, they ring up the people closely associated with the subject. From these enquiries the most suitable guests are chosen and sworn to secrecy. To add an element of surprise a guest is sought, close to the subject, but who has not been seen for many years; on alternatively a person much admired by the subject but one whom he has never had an opportunity to meet.

When the Researchers and Investigators have completed their work, the information is passed to the Scriptwriters. His draft script is discussed and when finally approved, Mary McAnnally searches for stills or any other material required to illustrate the final story.

This is a fairly superficial outline of how the operation works but because of the stringent security precautions imposed there was little else Nina could reveal. It’s a bit like the man in the commercial for a drink that shall remain nameless, who clambers into a telephone kiosk and starts to whisper, “The secret of Sch… is…” and is suddenly whisked away to an unknown destination by a mysterious enemy. In dealing with this department, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing so if you are unfortunate enough to discover something you shouldn’t, keep quiet about it – and stay out of telephone kiosks!

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The Entertainments Committee are organising a ‘MISS THAMES 1970’ Competition to find a woman with sufficient poise, personality and figure to satisfy a panel of judges. Contestants must be employees of THAMES and can be nominated by any other member of staff. With a First prize of £50, a Second prize of £25 and a Third prize of £10, the competition is well worth entering.

Contestants will be asked to appear before the Judges in cocktail dresses.

There will be an eliminating round at a dance to be held at Teddington on Saturday, 6 December with music provided by the New Era Jazz Band.

Finalists go forward to the crowning ceremony, which will be held during THAMES Staff Party at the Lyceum on 9 January. The Evening Press will cover this event.

Nomination forms are available from Peter Goodwin at Teddington and Hazel Warburton at Television House.

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Certainly they fulfil requirements which are various and not always obvious. Many programmes are far from dead after their first transmission. They are sold all over the world for later screening and Alys provides the scripts that have to go with them. It is often necessary, too, to refer back to programmes to find out who appeared in them, who made them, where they were made, what was said, how long they took to make, and how much they cost. The impressive coverage by ‘This Week’ of the invasion of Czechoslovakia, for example, provided material for the much acclaimed ‘Report’ documentary, ‘Remember Czechoslovakia’. Current affairs programmes, in particular, create more than transient interest among viewers. Requests for information are frequent and take in a wide spectrum of people from comprehensive scholars to university professors; some of the latter including an increasing number of academics who are making special studies of television as a communications medium.

Alys is, like all archivists, preoccupied with considerations of space – where to put everything, what is to be kept or thrown away. And now space becomes even more important. In her corner of the Cottage at Teddington she is in the process of centralising the Company’s technical books and in setting up, as a branch of the Information Section, a small comprehensive library of standard reference books for the use of all departments based at Teddington.

In character with all libraries, the value of the Company archives will continue to increase with time.

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Here’s Thames, as always falling on to air at 0925 thanks to the ever-unstable switchover from TV-am, and going straight into news read by a man with definitive mid-1980s hair.

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Brian was born in London on 19 February, 1929 and educated at Chiswick County School for Boys, where he was awarded a State Scholarship to Oxford. Before starting his degree course he served in the Royal Artillery and was seconded to the Forces Broadcasting Service Station in Trieste.

At Oxford Brian read English Literature and Language at Exeter College and received a BA First Class Honours Degree with the highest marks of his year in that subject, later becoming an MA.

His career in Television started with the BBC Television Training School for Producers. After producing and directing his first television programme – a musical show starring Pat Kirkwood, Brian continued to devise, produce and direct every kind of Light Entertainment for the next four years. In 1954 he won the National Television Award for devising, producing and directing ‘Ask Pickles’, which was voted “the most entertaining series of the year”.

In 1957 Brian joined Associated Television and won the National Guild of Television Producers and Directors Award as Light Entertainment Producer of the Year.

Three years later Brian became ABC Television’s Supervisor of Features and Light Entertainment. In 1962 he was appointed Programme Controller, in 1965 was appointed to the Board of ABC and in 1968 became Director of Programmes on the Board of Thames Television.

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Bryan’s day starts with an alarm call at 7.45 a.m. when he staggers into the kitchen, falls over the cat, turns on Tony Blackburn, hastily drinks his coffee and makes an early departure to search for the first available parking meter.

Before going into the office he visits the nearest tobacconist to stock-up on the day’s supply of cigarettes and cigars – how substantial a supply you can judge from the photographs.

The day begins with the morning papers, a large intake of nicotine, five cups of coffee and a conference with Producer, Nicolas Mellersh. Bryan is responsible for all the Light Entertainment items of ‘Today’, and much of the morning is taken up with booking people in advance for future programmes.

After a final conference with Tom Steel, Associate Producer, Bryan retires to the White Horse for fortification – if desperate, other alternatives are sought and Reg, pictured below, must guard his refreshments with zeal.

The afternoons are spent in the studio when the pace becomes much more hectic.

According to Bryan, a director’s most essential quality is the ability to con people – to convince them that you know more than them, that you are in complete control and know exactly what you are doing. “If I wasn’t a Director, I’d make a super con-man!”

“A Director is responsible for presentation. If we compare a Producer to the manager of a shop, a Director would be his window-dresser. The Producer decides what goods are to be displayed and the Director decides how they are shown, where they are shown and what lighting effects should be used.”

For Bryan, the most rewarding aspect of directing is editing: “I adore editing because when all your material is there you can retire with a Film Editor, select all the best bits and put it all together in a creative, imaginative way. I hate ‘live’ television as it is impossible to attain the same standards of perfection.”

His greatest compliment to date came from a Light Entertainment Producer who said, “You’re too much of a perfectionist, Bryan.” The most constructive comment, however, came from his doctor, who said, “You smoke too much Bryan!”

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Pauline who lives in West Norwood, has had a fairly chequered career in Television. She began by typing scripts, spent a few days in Presentation, transferred to Accounts, then Sales Records, then Research followed by a short spell of audio typing and finally settled in Reg Courtney Brown’s Information Section.

Her hobbies are mainly centred on ‘Pub-crawling and Jazz’ but Pauline is also keen to start an evening course in Sociology and is interested in the Open University Scheme. “I’m a terrific hoarder, too, and have a mania for collecting things like coins, stones, shells and postcards.”

She plans to spend Christmas in New York this year so that she can visit her mother and brother. The idea of living there permanently however, does not appeal. During her stay Pauline wants to visit the ghettos of New York and Chicago to judge for herself what conditions there are really like. Pauline has been saving for this trip since July. The return fare is £75. After paying a deposit of £30 she put away £4 a week to make up the difference and cover spending money.

Pauline finds Television an interesting and exciting medium to work in but rather boring to watch. The only exception to this rule is THAMES ‘It Takes A Thief’ series, starring Robert Wagner. When that’s on she drinks at home instead!

At one time Pauline gained some modelling experience. On an amateur basis she used to model at Ealing Technical College. She loves modem clothes and after carefully budgeting expenditure on cigarettes, social activities and jazz records has managed to build up a fairly extensive and suitably ‘with it’ wardrobe.

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It is this aspect of working in Television that makes interviewing people so interesting. You never really know what unexpected ambition, interest or achievement you’ll be surprised with next.

What this long, rambling introduction is leading up to is that there is a 24-year-old poet working in Promotion. Kevin Morgan, who recently left the Wardrobe Department at Teddington to become a Promotion Scriptwriter at Television House, is having some of his poetry published by Corgi in an anthology compiled by a Scot called Pete Morgan. Two of Kevin’s poems have been used on John Peel’s radio show and he has written lyrics that have been accepted by the Herd pop group.

Kevin’s writing success is not confined to poetry. He has also had television scripts used on Mike and Bernie’s show and ‘Do Not Adjust Your Set’. Two of his plays – one a drama and the other a comedy are currently being considered and another may be used by his brother, who runs a theatre in Edinburgh.

Kevin eventually wants to write full-time, specialising in drama rather than comedy but experimenting with every medium.

Printed below is a small selection of his poetry.

Happy Hippies

A day in the Park
with a multitude of youth
with a multitude of mind
with no trouble of any kind
listening to the sound
sitting on the ground
feeling the tones
of the Rolling Stones
in concert… in freedom … in the Park.

Imperial War Museum

Images on film once men, now dead.
Stare at the living with glassy eyes
From their position on the wall.
Over the heads of the crowds they can
See the weapons of their destruction Housed in this very same hall.
Living crowds mingle with the tanks and guns
That brought death for so many.
They are polished with loving care
By a caretaker who was never there
To see the death masks of disembowelled
Troops: He does not smell the sadness in
This monument to mens madness…

I think of you

When I see beauty expressed in flowers
I think of you.
For you have seen that beauty too.

When I see love expressed by a smile
I think of you.
For I have had that smile from you.

When I hear music that’s softened my soul
I think of you.
For I know you have loved it too.

When I see sorrow, sadness and grief
I think of you.
You have had your share of sorrow too.

Switch me

Switch me on and switch me off
Turn me round and set me back
Switch off my brain and lock my eyes.
Thoughts and ideas I have no lack
But you shut me up because you are wise
If I cannot speak I tell no lies
And if I cannot speak I tell no truth.
So wind me up and run me down
Switch me on and switch me off.

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Peter was educated as a boarder at St. George’s College, Weybridge. “It was the sort of place you can’t stand when you’re actually there but which is nice to look back on – mainly because one was never bored.”

Even now he has little time to be bored with a wide range of interests that include skiing, rowing, hiking, plays, films and studying psychology.

Peter has just returned to live with his parents in Teddington after paying “a palace rent for doss house facilities” but is looking for another more reasonable flat. He is also saving for a car – “Nothing very grand. Just an old banger I can muck about with until I learn something about mechanics.”

Despite the fact that he gives a credible imitation of a professional male model in this photograph, Peter says that, although he takes an interest in his clothes and general appearance, he is not particularly narcissistic. “In fact I can go a whole twenty minutes without having to dash to the nearest mirror and gloat.”

During the course of the interview, the conversation led to the delicate topic of women. For all female readers waiting with bated breath to discover if they are Peter’s ideal type, he likes them “old, sophisticated and mature”. “Old” covers anything over twenty-five but all senile, aged thirty-year-olds need not despair. A forthcoming issue will no doubt have this space occupied by an “old, sophisticated, mature” male!

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