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.

The post Where they once were: Brian Tesler appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.

Lord Mountbatten was born in the first year of the century and had taken part in the pageant of history, with a seat in the Royal Box. Always attracted by the visual arts and a pioneer in the use of the motion picture for the training and entertainment of the Royal Navy, he had turned down all the offers to publish his written autobiography. It was typical of Mountbatten to choose the most up-to-date of all media, television, as his means of personal communication. His agreement with Rediffusion was that he would make himself available, together with his rare collection of diaries, letters, photographs, films and memories, to record his life on camera. In return he would possess the overseas rights of the resulting programmes, for the benefit of his Broadlands estate. Rediffusion assigned to him their distinguished documentary producer, Peter Morley, and for three years these two men worked together, with increasing understanding. Lord Mountbatten has admitted the early attempts to interview him on film were disappointing, but inexorably he mastered the technique and became an accomplished professional broadcaster.

I believe the original concept was a series of twenty-six half-hour programmes, although no networking arrangement with the other companies had been negotiated. During lengthy screening sessions Brian Tesler and I reviewed the results with Peter Morley; in ‘rough cut’ we looked at hours of library material, mostly in black and white, with new material filmed in colour of Lord Mountbatten returning to his scenes of glory.

Our decision was to make this the show piece for Thames. We took the bold course and decided to make twelve one-hour episodes, transmitted at the peak time of nine o’clock, though we had no illusion that any of the other stations would be likely to follow our example.

All this we explained to Lord Mountbatten and his film producer son-in-law Lord Brabourne, a joint ally valuable to both of us. I remember how Lord Mountbatten came down to our riverside Teddington studios to get to know us better. After luncheon aboard our ‘retired’ boat, the m.v. Iris, a survivor of Dunkirk, we went on a tour of the premises. On the nearby car park the Drama Department were recording a section of Frontier, where a firing squad in British Army uniforms was lined up to execute an Indian spy. As we were walking towards them the production halted and out of habit Lord Mountbatten ‘inspected’ the shooting squad. They must have looked a motley lot, actors in uniforms hired from Berman’s. There was only one real soldier around, a regimental sergeant major seconded from Aldershot to act as military adviser and obviously enjoying a few leisurely days at Teddington supervising an Equity squad and drilling them for the sequence. His embarrassment can be imagined when the raggle-taggle of actors suddenly found themselves being inspected by the Supremo himself! The RSM’s face was red as Lord Mountbatten gave him a curt nod. Inside, a prison play was in production. Lord Mountbatten was impressed with the dress rehearsal of a scene where the prisoner was taken from the condemned cell to face the Governor in his office. The reproduction was accurate, as Lord Mountbatten knew from his recent survey of prisons and subsequent report to the Government on the subject. He smilingly congratulated me afterwards on the excellent organisation of having troops on parade and a prison play laid on for him!

This was a pleasant interlude away from the attrition which had broken out in the ITCA headquarters where the new “Big Five’ were now meeting to plan the first season’s programmes of the new phase of ITV. Interesting new characters had arrived upon the familiar scene, as the principals turned up with their adherents. The infiltration of the new had begun.

One familiar face was missing. Rediffusion’s former protagonist, John McMillan, had been submerged in the blending of ABC and Rediffusion. Cecil Bernstein, Lew Grade and I had agreed that John McMillan’s knowledge and experience should not disappear from ITV, and we lost no time in creating for him a new job in the industry, as Director of Sport. Such an appointment was not welcomed by the incoming London Weekend Television who were now to be responsible for Saturday sport and wanted to take over ABC’s World of Sport.

At the programme planning meetings the old guard was much in evidence; Cecil Bernstein, with another Granada pioneer, Denis Forman; Lew Grade, with his latest number two, Robin Gill, a pressurising young man with ambitions to succeed even Lew Grade himself; Brian Tesler and I, who had now moved up the ladder from the week-ends and provinces to London. The new companies were represented by Yorkshire’s Ward Thomas and Donald Baverstock, and London Weekend’s buoyant team of Michael Peacock and Tom Margerison, both eager to teach new tricks to old masters.

The situation was clearly defined. In the assessment of the Authority, four companies had equal strength and opportunity, with practically the same potential advertisement revenue and the same potential profit, £3,000,000. Yorkshire came fifth in size and revenue, but with their fair share of networked programming guaranteed by the Authority.

Lew Grade had been swayed by Robin Gill’s financial calculations to concentrate on the Midlands contract, but now he was without his foothold in London and was one more regional contractor. As a former tenant of the London Weekend preserve he was also smarting under the deprecatory comments Michael Peacock continued to make to the press about ATV’s shortcomings, and his promises of more uplifting programmes at week-ends. Surrounded by his shining knights from the BBC, he believed implicitly in what London Weekend’s colourful application for the franchise had set forth. Now he was determined to prove his words and to revitalise the week-end’s television.

Granada had been little disturbed by the changes, except that they now faced the problem of contributing from Lancashire their quota of Saturday and Sunday programmes on a reduced income. Yorkshire had its own task of starting off with new staff and without any programmes in reserve. They would have to originate fewer programmes than the other four, but correspondingly they had to network more than anyone else and therefore their ratings depended upon whatever new programmes were available for them. The programme output of Granada, ATV and Thames was predictable, but after the shouting had died down would LWT be capable of supplying an effective Saturday-Sunday output?

Even when the interchange of programmes was agreed payments would still have to be arranged between the five companies; a new system had to be devised. An immediate issue was that if LWT were to be given absolute control of Saturday afternoon sport why was the budget for World of Sport so suddenly inflated? What percentage of Midland, Lancashire and Yorkshire sports contributions would be included in the reconstructed programme?

Peacock and Tom Margerison faced up to this with apparent equanimity but when they returned to their office in Burlington Street there must have been some puzzled consultations with their colleagues. BBC-trained executives were used to competing in a gentlemanly way for allocations of the overall budget and once the figures were settled they simply ordered programmes from the appropriate departments. They had merely to ask for fifty hours of drama, sixty hours from Light Entertainment, and so on, then await the detailed proposals. ITV programme controllers had to go back to their studios and then make their own programmes. At LWT there was little understanding of the intricacies of ITV programme finance and the proper division of costs. Nor was the scheduling, planned with the other four major companies, the final stage; there still remained the ten regional companies to be convinced of the workability of the schedules.

The final judgement, though, would come from the public, and there was a wide difference between the time-honoured BBC policy of giving the public what was good for them, and the ITV attitude of trying to offer the public what they would like to view. If the public did not respond to whatever was new and revolutionary in the LWT week-end schedule then the advertisers, an ultra-conservative group, would probably sit back and wait until the required audience was assembled, just as they had done in the early and desperate days of ITV.

It was in this uneasy and uncertain mood that ITV was relaunched in its new career in August 1967. Many tried and favourite programmes had been thrown out of the new schedule. Unknown and unresearched programmes were being tendered by three new companies; a percentage of failure was inevitable. Unfortunately, too, a new method of audience research was being introduced. TAM Rating (Television Audience Measurement) was another of the casualties of the era of change, to be replaced by Audits of Great Britain’s new system (“son of Tam’ some called it). The new means of audience appraisal had the backing of the Joint Industry Committee for Television Advertising Research (JICTAR) and therefore was financed collectively by advertisers, agencies and the programme companies. It was an improved system but two years would go by before its new standards of measurement would be understood and accepted.

Meanwhile, according to the first JICTAR figures the audience for ITV had shrunk alarmingly, almost overnight.

The post Mountbatten’s ratings appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post People behind programmes: Brian Tesler appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.

On 7 July the Executive Directors visited the site accompanied by the two architects – John Ware, responsible for the Control Rooms and Studios; and Marshall Levy for the overall conversion of the building. Dave Dunn, in charge of the move, our Clerk of Works, Ted Mathews, and Philip Berkeley acted as guides to the Directors.

The tour of inspection started in the foyer – still a shell of brick and concrete. Marshall Levy had prepared perspective sketches showing two different colour schemes made after consultation with Alan Kaupe, and the choice was made on the spot. The second decision was how to use the small shop which we have, just adjoining the foyer, and this was much easier to visualise on the spot. It will become a newspaper, magazine and tobacconist’s kiosk.

The party then examined the dressing rooms, the two studios and so up to the Central Apparatus Room, where the installation of equipment racks had begun. The control rooms are planned very much like those at Teddington, but with rather more acoustic isolation because of traffic noise and the possibility of noise from tube trains running below Warren Street.

These air-conditioned technical areas, the vast telecine area with its open booths for the individual machines were very favourably compared with the cramped layout at Television House. The party then had a look at one of the office floors, still raw concrete but with the windows glazed. These again are a complete contrast to Television House but still difficult to visualise in their final form.

As the builders moved out, it became the responsibility of a team led by ‘Rick’ Rickards and Peter Smart to get the cables laid and the equipment installed and working. This will be one long rush job – as by 17 November colour programmes must pass through our new London Centre to the GPO Tower and the Croydon and Crystal Palace Transmitters. The whole technical operations staff of Television House will by then be working from Euston – together with a small film and administration group.

Phase II of the building scheme provides the additional accommodation for these people, including a temporary canteen and will be complete before November. It will not be until September 1970 before all the remaining office, film, restaurant and other areas are completed and ready for the final move out of Television House.

To look after administrative matters, Dave Dunn has been appointed Manager at Euston and took up permanent residence on 21 July, with Sue Shields as his Secretary – the first girl on site.

From the photographs it is possible to get a good idea of the extent of the building, the service roadways passing through it and the relationship with our new neighbours. There is no doubt about our proximity to the GPO Tower – the No.1 reason for choosing a site in that part of London.

The post Progress at Euston appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.