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.

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.

The post TVTimes covers appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.

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Benny Hill presented his versions of the New Avengers, Mastermind, I Claudius, Dickie Davies and even Bionic Baby, in the first of his self-penned specials for 1977. A third of Britain watched.

People & Politics continued into the New Year, with Llew Gardner mixing individual interviews Merlyn Rees, David Steel and Harold Lever were among his subjects with broader debates on topics like transport, and workers participation.

February and March again saw Hughie Green’s Opportunity Knocks! in its fifteenth series riding high in the network top ten every week.

Get Some In!, with Tony Selby starring in John Esmonde and Bob Larbeys comedy of National Service life, had two new series during 1977. Their average network audience for the year was over 15 million viewers per episode.

Not many programmes reach across the class and age spectrum to inspire much the same reaction from diverse people, but Get Some In! is one of them.

Countless National Servicemen (Retd.) – and their fathers – dredging up memories of wartime basic training – keep telling me that the show is not only funny but true to life.

A highly skilfully rationed sprinkle of nostalgia – in the first edition of the new season, references to Ruby Murray and Ronnie Ronalde – Tony Selby’s craven bully of a Corporal, and unselfish teamwork by the rest of the cast, make Get Some In! hard to resist.

Daily Mail

Two popular Outside Broadcast series returned on 23 February. James Hunt was special guest in the first Drive In, with Shaw Taylor and Tony Bastable introducing television’s only regular magazine programme for motorists.

And Keith Fordyce and Claire Rayner returned in Kitchen Garden, to show how to grow and cook your own garden produce – from growing potatoes in a bucket, to cooking your own sour Borscht.

Terry Scott, Lionel Blair and Aimi Macdonald were among the personalities joining Roy Castle, to try to guess the famous parents of young guests who appeared in the new series of Whose Baby?

Mandao, a thoroughbred stallion, was the star of Horse in the House, a six-part children’s drama series written by Rosemary Anne Sissons. Kim McDonald played Mandao’s owner, Melanie.

This Week continued their regular coverage of Ireland in ‘Derry, Time to Remember’, five years after Bloody Sunday. And in Rhodesia, Jonathan Dimbleby talked with Ian Smith and President Nyerere on the failure of the Kissinger plan; in September he would return to cover the next Anglo-American plan.

Outside Broadcasts went to Wembley twice during February to cover England’s fortunes in soccer matches with Holland, and the crucial World Cup battle with Luxembourg.

Rooms continued to occupy the afternoon drama slot each Tuesday and Wednesday, with over sixty episodes in 1977 on the people and events in a West London rooming house.

Getting something new for Robin was a long-term plan. We thought there was a lot more to say about the characters but not in the setting of ‘Man About the House’, which, after 39 episodes, had exhausted their possibilities. Robin is now living happily unmarried, with the daughter of the man whose cash pays for a restaurant business…

Johnnie Mortimer, co-writer with Brian Cooke of ‘Man About the House, top 1976 situation comedy ‘George & Mildred’; and in January, ‘Robin’s Nest’.

‘Welcome to Robin’s Nest, a most professional quick-fire comedy series by Johnnie Mortimer and Brian Cooke, Richard O’Sullivan (Robin) lives with Tessa Wyatt (Vicky) – and a handsome pair they make – much to the disgust of Vicky’s father (Tony Britton, who has the expert timing of a comic pro). We are often labelled a permissive society, but how many years since it has been portrayed in cinema and theatre has it taken television to present a comedy series about living together?’

The Listener

The first episode of Robin’s Nest jumped into the National Top Twenty in third place. It was up to number 2 for the rest of January, kept from top position only by…

This is Your Life, presented by Eamonn Andrews, which held the top network audience for ten weeks running from January through to March. This is Your Life’s perennial audience appeal is reflected by its taking nine out of the top twenty programme viewing figures for the calendar year 1977.

ITV’s first major documentary of the year was Hazlitt in Love, a dramatised film of the famous writer’s love life, written by C P Taylor and based on Hazlitt s book ‘Liber Amoris’. Kenneth Haig played the title role with Lynne Frederick as his femme fatale.

‘Beautifully photographed sexual cliff-hanger based on the slim volume published by the essayist William Hazlitt in expiation of his obsession with his landlady’s daughter, Sarah Walker. Lynne Frederick is faun-like as the lady; Kenneth Haigh is the distressed essayist.’

Evening Standard

Wish You Were Here…? Outside Broadcasts’ midwinter preview of summer holidays, took viewers out and about in Britain with Judith Chalmers and Chris Kelly. During January they travelled from Pitlochry in Scotland and Killarney in Ireland, to Jersey, North Wales and resorts in England.

Christopher Neame and Ann Hasson starred as Romeo & Juliet in a special Schools production of Shakespeare’s play, transmitted in eight episodes.

This Week started the year with an exclusive interview by Peter Williams of Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, just two days after his arrival in Britain. The following week saw the second part of John Fielding’s Soho gangster expose on the murder of ‘Scarface’ Smithson.

Denis Norden’s afternoon programme Looks Familiar had a rare scoop on 12 January when David Niven provided a memorable half-hour’s nostalgia about life in Hollywood during the ’30s and ’40s.

Elizabeth Shepherd, one of the heroines in Romance, described a romantic as ‘someone who does not pine for the loss of her past and has an absolute belief in the possibilities of the future.’ It was this image of the romantic heroine that was revived in six love stories based on classic romantic novels taken from a century of the British love story. Producer Peter Duguid explained his aims in bringing romance back to television:

‘Many of these novels were considered so risque by contemporary readers that they produced a storm of controversy.

‘But while today’s viewers will find little to outrage in our series, I believe we have recreated for television a genre that has been underexposed to the point where it has become, perhaps, undervalued: full-blooded, rich in romance, with a hero, a heroine, often a villain, and a story with a beginning, a middle and an end.

‘It is these easily recognisable values which made the originals so popular, and we have tried to respect them in our television adaptations. I hope that viewers will share and enjoy the magic of these marvellous love stories.’

Three Weeks by Elinor Glyn, adapted by Gerald Savory, director Waris Hussein, starring Elizabeth Shepherd, Simon MacCorkindale.

Moths by Ouida, adapted by Hugh Whitemore, director Waris Hussein, starring Cathryn Harrison, Nigel Davenport, Maria Aitken.

The Black Knight by Ethel M Dell, adapted by John Kershaw, director Peter Hammond, starring Sinead Cusack, Edward Fox, Simon Williams.

High Noon by Ruby M Ayres, adapted by Julia Jones, director Barry Davis, starring Celia Bannerman, Lynn Farleigh, John Fraser.

House of Men by Catherine Marchant, adapted by Ray Jenkins, director Piers Haggard, starring Mary Larkin, James Laurenson, Michael Kitchen.

Emily by Jilly Cooper, adapted by Eleanor Bron, director Alastair Reid, starring Gemma Craven, Ronald Pickup.

Elegance, style, wit and charm

Sunday Times

Take a dash of Wuthering Heights, add a dollop of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, stir in lashings of true romance… marvellous, good old-fashioned stuff.

Daily Express

For sheer escapism, stories with a beginning, a middle and, usually, a comforting end, it will be difficult to beat Romance.

Morning Star

Money-Go-Round, Good Afternoon’s special feature on consumer news, marked its hundredth edition in March with Joan Shenton and Tony Bastable surveying the changes in eating, shopping and life-styles over the past hundred years. Good Afternoon continued daily at 2.00 pm, featuring guests like Alan Coren (on the Silver Jubilee) and Yehudi Menuhin reflecting on his life in music.

March saw the debut of a new 13-part children’s series Jamie and the Magic Torch, from Thames’ animation subsidiary Cosgrove Hall Productions.

In March, This Week’s coverage ranged from Peter Taylor investigating the success of ‘The Hustler’, a sex magazine that is now America’s third best-selling periodical, to John Fielding’s widely-acclaimed expose of The Poisoning of Michigan a This Week Special which told a horrifying story of death and disease resulting from chemical pollution.

While Rock Follies of ’77 was in the final stages of production, the original Rock Follies series was being repeated in Britain, taking America by storm on the Public Broadcasting Network, and winning the Best Drama Series award in the British Academy awards, and two Royal Television Society awards.

The zingy highlight is sure to be Rock Follies – a five-part, five-and-a-half-hour sock-it-to-’em musical soap opera about three smashing birds, long past their teens, who set out to become England’s top group. This funky bundle from Britain, produced by Thames Television, was a rollicking hit over there and ought to score pretty high Stateside as a likeable, offbeat showbiz saga. Throughout, Rock Follies provides a unique and exhilarating change of tempo: less snob appeal, more sex appeal.

Playboy

The post Winter programmes appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.

Once again, This is Your Life was the single most successful series on British television during 1977. It also achieved its own all-time biggest audience on 27 April, when Lord Mountbatten was surprised by Eamonn Andrews in the Thames foyer, and with nearly 18½ million viewers watching, spent an hour reviewing his past in the company of his family, Juliet Mills, Sir John Mills, Vera Lynn, Sir Bernard Miles, Danny Kaye, Jackie Coogan, and (on film) Bob Hope and Douglas Fairbanks Jnr. By popular request the programme was repeated on Boxing Day. By then the current series was already under way; outstanding among the present run of Lives’ was the tribute to Virginia Wade, winner of her first Wimbledon title in Jubilee Year.

Opportunity Knocks discovery Tom O’Connor established in 1976 through Wednesday at Eight and in the Royal Variety Performance, featured in his own series of six half-hours which began in March. Tom’s humour was complemented by musical entertainment from guests like Barbara Dickson Mahogany and the King’s Singers.

Two more Opportunity Knocks proteges, Syd Little and Eddie Large, topped the bill for their first major series in The Little and Large Tellyshow. With guests from the younger generation of pop music – Suzi Quatro, The Jacksons, Linda Lewis, the Four Tops, and Rock Follies’ Rula Lenska among them – the show came into the Top Twenty at number 13, stayed there for three weeks and then jumped into the top five.

And starting on the same Monday night in April, Man About the House’s Paula Wilcox went straight to number one in London, second on the Network, in the lead role of Richard Waring’s new comedy series Miss Jones and Son. It was an outstanding success from a controversial subject – that of an unmarried mother. ‘Richard Waring’s scripts look for laughs in the right places, and set the complicated life of the motherly Miss Jones in a houseful of sympathetic and lively characters,’ concluded the Evening News.

Richard O’Sullivan, who starred alongside Paula Wilcox in Man About the House, hosted the 1977 TV Times Awards, transmitted on 14 April. Among the Thames stars to whom he presented awards were John Thaw (Most Compulsive Male Character), Julie Covington (Top Female Singer), Yootha Joyce (Funniest Female Personality), and Penelope Keith and John Inman who were both at the time working on new Thames series (The Norman Conquests and Odd Man Out respectively). Top Male TV Personality was Bruce Forsyth, whose one-hour special Bruce and More Girls, with Lesley-Anne Down, Nanette Newman and Dana, topped the London and UK ratings in the same week.

‘Not only did Bruce Forsyth do well with last year’s light entertainment special – he seems to be doing even better as tonight’s show proves. It is literally bulging with talented singing, dancing and comic young women. If there’s one thing that Bruce Forsyth generates it’s pleasure’.

Evening News

Special Easter programming included The Story of Job, a new ballet choreographed to the music of Vaughan Williams by Robert Cohan, danced by the London Contemporary Dance Theatre and narrated by Andrew Cruikshank: and on Easter Monday, Outside Broadcasts went to the Big Top in Croydon for a special Chipperfield’s Circus, hosted by David Hamilton.

‘A rare delight,’ said the Sunday Times; ‘engrossing… it’s all beautiful fun’ added the Daily Mail about Terry Dixons’ two one-hour films on the life and work of Walt Disney. Having achieved rare access to the Disney empire, the story was told both through film clips (from the earliest sketches to Disney’s wartime propaganda cartoons) and in the words of the people who knew and worked with Disney – animators and directors, Walt’s daughter (who sang Snow White’s songs), and even the living voice of Donald Duck, Clarence Nash. 14 million people watched the films, placing them firmly in the Top Ten, itself a rare achievement for television documentaries.

Former CIA Director William Colby and ex-Head of US Air Force Intelligence General Keegan were among those interviewed by Peter Williams in This Week’s five-programme series on international intelligence and espionage, which revealed a worldwide network of spying and intrigue, murder and blackmail, and a new, horrifying generation of nuclear ‘superweapons’.

‘NEW YEAR! NEW SHOW!
NEW FANTASIES!
WELCOME TO THE FOLLIES OF ’77!’

Rock Follies of ’77 began in May, was interrupted by dispute halfway through its run, and finally concluded towards the end of the year, by which time plans were already under way for a Follies feature film. In this second series the Little Ladies rock group, comprising Julie Covington, Rula Lenska, Charlotte Cornwell and new member Sue Jones-Davies, had found a new extrovert manager, zestfully played by Beth Porter. Over twenty new songs by Andy Mackay were included.

‘Festooned with television awards, the Little Ladies return as good as new. Maybe better. I like it very much. I always did. What more can I say but Hot Tomales! Crazee! Yassir!’

‘The most remarkable example of imagination and skills, marrying ideas and techniques, that British television has achieved in a long while.’

Guardian

‘It has displayed techniques, innovations, variety and wit which marks it, if not unique, certainly special. It showed us fresh skills with the medium which, hopefully, will leave their mark on future television drama.’

Morning Star

‘(We) will feel its vibrations for years to come. Schuman, director Bill Hayes and producer Andrew Brown stretched television’s oblong box and made it accommodate something that wouldn’t have worked half as well in any other medium. Was it a pop show, satire, social drama, Hollywood musical spoof, blue’ish revue, or what? The only possible answer is “Yes”.’

Sunday Times

The Government’s ‘Great Education Debate’ peaked in the early summer. Shortly after Panorama’s shock report on the Faraday school, Thames’ Our School and Hard Times gave perspective to progressive teaching in comprehensives. Producer David Hodgson, whose Magpie special on young gymnasts was transmitted earlier in the year, aired the children’s thoughts on their education through their creative work, as practised in an inner London comprehensive:

Then seven half-hour reports investigated the workings of our state schools, posing the question Could Do Better? Reporter Jenny Conway visited primary and secondary schools, asking what school is for and whether it achieves its aims. In the final programme, Education Minister Shirley Williams and Shadow Spokesman Norman St John Stevas spoke about their educational ideals.

‘Education has proved surprisingly difficult to treat on television in any sustained and popular way. These programmes have shown a surer, more popular grasp of the issues than many recent contributions to the debate.’

Times Education Supplement

Barry Hanson, now producing ‘Out’ for Euston Films, was producer on six new Plays for Britain for the ITV Playhouse. This series, which has an unrivalled record for introducing new drama writers to television, used contemporary Britain as the overall backcloth for all its stories. They ranged widely, from the kidnapping of a pop star, to a witty evocation of a large company’s annual outing, to a vivid story of a car-stealing ring.

Plays for Britain:

Not Quite Cricket by Barry Keefe
The Proofing Session by E A Whitehead
Cork and Bottle by Michael Sadler
Last Summer by Peter Prince
It’s Only Rock ’n Roll by Tony Bicat
The Road Runner by Michael Abbensetts

‘A hint of the long gone Armchair Theatre era of Sydney Newman productions. There was the same vivid interest in and sympathy with pedestrian enough matters, used to highlight wider social questions.’

Daily Mail

‘ITV Playhouse scored a hit for six with “It’s Not Quite Cricket” This story of an office outing and cricket match was a joy.’

Daily Mirror

Paradise Island originated as a short play by a design engineer called Michael Haley, inspired by a holiday in the Scilly Isles. He sent it to Thames, where it was developed into a whimsical situation comedy series with a cast of two – Bill Maynard and William Franklyn as, respectively, a priest and ships entertainments officer, who have been cast away on a desert island.

As Paradise Island concluded its run, William Franklyn remained on Thames screens with a totally different kind of comedy series – What’s on Next?, a fast-moving mix of jokes and sketches in which he was joined by Pam Ayres, Barry Cryer, Bob Todd, Jim Davidson, Anna Dawson and Sandra Dickinson.

This Monday night laugh-in gets funnier and funnier wrote the Daily Mail, and the audience agreed – it entered the London and Network Top Tens in third place, and by the second week had topped the London ratings.

‘Anyone too young to remember Laugh-In must have enjoyed the pace of What’s On Next?, wondering why previous comedy programmes hadn’t cashed in on sheer momentum. We have William Franklyn devilish smooth and caddishly quizzical, presiding over a team, encouraging smiles. It’s good to see Franklyn and his urbane, faintly disapproving style of light comedy. And it’s nice to get a show with so many comediennes.

Pam Ayres, the poetess whose metres seem to owe more to the Gas Board than inspiration, was the revelation. She is a wonderfully natural and appealing person, able to work more fun from a weak gag than plastic performers can find in a good one. Its mixture of low comedy and high spirits makes me ready to watch it again.’

Daily Mail

Outside Broadcasts covered the Derby and the Epsom Summer Meeting in June, and there were more horses in The King’s Troop, a colourful portrayal of the ceremonial horse artillery unit, which was transmitted on Jubilee Thursday.

In May and June, This Week concentrated on the major overseas stories then dominating the headlines – three programmes on the Middle East, and two on the Ulster loyalist strike.

Good Afternoon, attracting special attention for its harder news interviews and coverage, increased its audience through the year. April saw Mavis Nicholson interviewing Lady Mosley on her controversial biography of Sir Oswald and in May, she interviewed R D Laing. Judith Chalmers discussed natural childbirth with Frederic Leboyer, and all four presenters (with Elaine Grand and Mary Parkinson) met Stock Exchange Chairman Nicholas Goodison in the Thames studio. Film and OB reports covered education, nuclear power, and Morris dancing in the Cotswolds.

‘We believe passionately in making programmes which respect our afternoon audience. We don’t reckon to make programmes for ghetto groups of any kind, but for any intelligent viewer who may choose to look at us. There are now three million of them, and 33⅓% are male.’

Catherine Freeman, Producer, Good Afternoon.

Eric Sykes showed his rarely-seen talents as singer, dancer and musician as well as comedian, in a self-scripted one-hour special which reunited him with many of his long-standing partners in entertainment – Hattie Jacques, Jimmy Edwards, Irene Handl and Peter Cook among them.

The post Spring programmes appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.

• Today
• This Week
• People & Politics
• Time For Business
• Thames at 6
• London Looks Forward
  • The Living City
  • The Future City
• Documentaries
  • Hazlitt in Love
  • The Gospel According To St Michael
  • Walt Disney (2 programmes)
  • Marriage Guidance
  • Lonely Hearts
  • The Ruth Ellis Story
  • The Hunting of Force Z
  • Hammer & Sickle
  • Billy
  • Jimmy
  • Aycliffe

OUTSIDE BROADCASTS

• Series
  • Drive In
  • A Town Called
  • Kitchen Garden
  • Wish You Were Here…?
  • Pub Entertainer of the Year
• Sport
  • Darts
  • Horse Racing from Sandown, Newmarket, Epsom, Lingfield
  • Football (7 matches, including 4 internationals)
  • Sportscene
  • Wrestling
• Events
  • Jubilee Flower Show
  • Miss Thames
  • Astrology
  • Model Railway Exhibition
  • Nurse of the Year
  • Variety Club Lunch
  • Evening Standard Drama Awards
  • Evening News Film Awards
  • Royal Film Performance
  • Great British Achievements
  • Chipperfield’s Circus (Easter and Christmas)
  • The Motor Show
  • Britannia Awards
  • The Loyal Address

LIGHT ENTERTAINMENT

• Specials
  • The Benny Hill Show
  • TV Times Top Ten Awards
  • The Eric Sykes Show
  • Bruce and More Girls
  • The Peggy Lee Show
  • Max Bygraves’ Christmas Show
  • Vera Lynn Sings
• Series
  • David Nixon Show
  • Looks Familiar
  • Opportunity Knocks
  • This is Your Life
  • Whose Baby?
  • Whodunnit?
  • Wednesday at Eight
  • The Tom O’Connor Show
  • The Little and Large Tellyshow
  • Night Out at The London Casino
• Comedy Series
  • Odd Man Out
  • Get Some In
  • George and Mildred
  • What’s On Next?
  • Paradise Island
  • Miss Jones & Son
  • The Fuzz
  • The Upchat Line

CHILDREN’S

• Pre-School Learning
  • Rainbow
  • Rainbow Has A Baby
• General Interest
  • Magpie
  • Fanfare
  • Somersault to Moscow (Magpie Special)
  • …And I Write Music (Magpie Special)
• Drama
  • The Tomorrow People
  • Horse in The House
• Animation Series
  • Jamie and The Magic Torch
  • Chorlton and The Wheelies
• Entertainment
  • Michael Bentine’s Potty Time
  • Sooty
• Pre-School Entertainment
  • And Maisy Too
  • Mice and Mendelson
  • The Wotsit From Whizz-Bang

FEATURES, EDUCATION AND RELIGION

• Features
  • After Noon
  • Mavis
  • Money-Go-Round
  • London Scene
  • Superman & The Bride
  • The Story of Job
  • Problems
  • Help!
  • Our School and Hard Times
• Education
  • Seeing and Doing
  • Finding Out
  • The World Around Us
  • Writer’s Workshop
  • The English Programme
  • French Studies
  • It’s Life
  • It’s More Life
  • London: The Making of a City
• Adult Education
  • Could Do Better?
  • This Sporting Land
• Religion
  • Get Out and Push
  • Close
  • Christmas Pie
  • Drawing to an End
  • Faith In Place: Matt’s Place
  • Christmas Special
  • A Matter of Morals
  • St Nicolas Cantata

DRAMA

• Serial
  • Rooms – 61 episodes
• Series
  • Romance – 5 episodes
  • Rock Follies of ’77 – 7 episodes
  • London Belongs To Me – 7 episodes
  • The Norman Conquests
    • Table Manners
    • Living Together
    • Round & Round The Garden
• Film Series
  • The Sweeney
  • Van Der Valk
• Plays For Britain
  • Cork & Bottle
  • Last Summer
  • It’s Only Rock ’n Roll
  • The Proofing Session
  • Not Quite Cricket

The post The programme year 1977 appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post People behind programmes: Philip Jones appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.