Not just clowns and pretty girls

INSIDE television they know Brian Tester as Brian Hustler. He is a sleek, slick young man who has shot to the top of his profession and at 38 is now to become ITV’s main challenge to the B.B.C.

It is Tester who next year will become head of the new London ITV station, Thames Television. It is he who will have to face the combined B.B.C. barrage of Huw Wheldon, Paul Fox, and David Attenborough.

It is he who will have the chance of bring [sic] a new revolution to the settled, static world of TV

Tester is regarded as something of a whizz-kid inside TV. He is a natty dresser, a jaunty middle-sized man with an outsize brain

Just 48 hours after knowing he was to be the most important creative man in ITV, he was already planning the first new shows for the reshaped commercial channel which begins to operate next summer.

Oscar

TESLER made his name as a light entertainment producer, a builder of spectaculars. He was trained by the B.B.C. and moved to the commercial channel in 1957 to take over the London Palladium Show. That year he won the TV Producers’ Guild Oscar as light entertainment producer of the year. Yet his background is academic, not show business.

He won a State scholarship to Oxford from grammar school, took a first-class honours degree in English with the highest marks of his year.

“My interests,” he told me “are by no means confined to clowns and pretty ladies.”

It was nearly three years ago that A.B.C. Television put him on its board.

The whizz-kid had made it and A.B.C became one of the few of the 14 commercial TV companies to cease playing safe and experiment idea with new faces and new ideas.

Facelift

TALKING frankly for the first time last night about the facelift which must come to TV, Tester said :—

“I never really consider the B.B.C. as opposition. There is no point simply in fighting for the biggest audience by trying to put the same kind of shows against each other.

“Of course we are competitors — but we must compete with quality. If all we do is to fight then the only person who loses is the man we are there to serve — you can’t produce a good service just by studying what your rival is doing and then filling the screen with a similar programme. We have had too much of that. The pattern has got to change.

“The pattern” is the latest worry in the TV world. In both Britain and America this autumn the – “sameness” of the programme routine has come in for big criticism.

When the new TV companies appointed in the ITV reshuffle fill the important TV hours from London, will Tesler really be able to break out and make a change?

He said : “There is no reason at all why the routine should not now be broken. It is ridiculous to accept that we should go on repeating ourselves ad infinitum — boring both the viewer and the men who make the programmes.

Tempted

“WE must be able to look at our programme schedules and not feel ashamed of them.”

Certainly, Rediffusion, which has been networking programmes from London since the start of ITV, has not been much opposition to the B.B.C.

Tesler said : “There is in TV a terrible temptation to be contemptuous of the audience. It is a big mistake to think that the public can be fooled so easily.”

Already, inside 48 hours, Tesler has scheduled a programme which will be a forum for new talent, artists, writers and musicians.

He said : “Apathy in this game is just not acceptable. It’s not enough any more just to build the biggest audience you can. We cannot cater for that kind of audience and win.”