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.

This brought incessant problems of morale and money. The ABC staff, trained in Manchester, were facing upheaval from their comfortable homes to start afresh in a ‘foreign’ city. Studio staffs had their loyalties split down the middle and were uncertain whether they would be working for LWT or for the new and unnamed company arising from the demise of ABC and Rediffusion.

ABC paid out half a million [£9 million now allowing for inflation] in redundancy settlements, and Rediffusion almost twice as much. There was also the question of pensions, and transfer of rights. Since Rediffusion’s pension funds had been invested with typical business acumen there were handsome benefits for those whose careers had developed with the growth of their company. Somehow we managed to keep ABC Television going and by the end of our last financial year (March 1968) we had a turnover of £11,753,000 [£203,000,000] and showed a trading profit of £2,159,000 [£37,350,000]. The parent Corporation could have no complaint about the return on its original investment.

When we came to giving the company its name I was resolutely opposed to any more initials. I had always envied the solidity and sturdiness of a single word like Granada or Rediffusion. I believe in descriptive titles for companies and products and I would have liked to include the magic word ‘London’ but already this belonged to London Weekend Television. (I had no regrets when they began to use the initials LWT for in the process they lost some of the impact of the word ‘London’.)

As well, I wanted a name that would lend itself to a graphic symbol. My first thought was Tower Television, combining the symbols of the old and the new, Tower Bridge and the General Post Office tower. In the end we settled for the name of Thames, influenced partly because our Teddington studios were alongside the river, near the ancient lock. It was also a name of international recognisability and our future expansion lay in world-wide sales. Above all, Thames was a romantic name, for many have come to London as I did, to stand on the bridges and gaze on the breath-taking skylines. My own favourite skyline was the rooftops of Whitehall, as seen from the bridge over the lake in Green Park, and it was this that led to the London skyline which became the symbol of Thames Television. We did take artistic liberties with our spires and somehow the Post Office tower popped up from behind St Paul’s Cathedral. The London Evening News calmly ‘lifted’ the skyline idea, turned it into a silhouette and used the result as their own symbol. We could hardly object, because London belongs to all of us who live and work there.

The signature music came to me when I saw a gypsy woman selling lavender in a Chelsea street. She was singing ‘Who’ll buy my sweet lavender?’ The street cries of London were the very first singing ‘commercials’. When the day came to launch Thames officially with a rather pompous opening ceremony at Mansion House, Lord Mayor and all, a pretty girl strolled into the gold-plated hall with a trayful of sprigs of lavender, singing ‘our song’. She happened to be a soprano from Sadler’s Wells, but the simple melody was a refreshing change from the customary fanfares. Some fortunate composer was commissioned to ‘orchestrate’ the tune, almost to the point of unrecognisability I regret to say, and it probably provided him with a pension for life.

But it was not all harmony in Television House when we began to move in to the former Rediffusion headquarters. I took a corner office in the building, from where I sighted Ivor Novello’s former roof-top flat, and Thames’ occupation began whilst the remaining staff of Rediffusion were still struggling loyally to complete the advertised programme schedule. Brian Tesler was already planning our new ‘mix’ for London weekdays. We decided on which ABC series to retain, and which of Rediffusion’s. Beyond that we planned new series like Frontier, a vigorous North West India episodic tale of war and love. For economy reasons this had to be filmed in the mountains of North Wales, which surprisingly were not all that different from the authentic Himalayas.

Rediffusion’s venerable current affairs programme This Week, was an inevitable choice, but we decided to drop the two quiz programmes which had overstayed their welcome and possibly had handicapped Rediffusion in their application, Take Your Pick and Double Your Money. We also decided to discontinue ATV’s Crossroads because of the poor quality of scripts and acting compared with Coronation Street. This turned out to be a mistake and the series had to be brought back by sheer public insistence. For this reason Crossroads episodes transmitted in the London area always languished six months behind the Birmingham sequences. Only years later were the episodes synchronised, with Noelle Gordon interpreting to the London audience in a special ‘what-happened-then’ edition the missing strands of the endless saga.

The post Who will buy my sweet lavender? appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.

TWW lost their contract to Harlech; Telefusion Yorkshire gained a foothold and half of Granada’s service area: ATV was to end their Midlands weekday/London weekend split and entrench themselves solely in the Midlands.

The most significant of the changes was that there would be no weekend contracts in either the North or Midlands, and ABC – undoubtedly the most distinctive of all ITV incumbents – had put their bid in for the weekends at London, a move they had been well-prepared for over a long period of time, and the award of which appeared to be merely a formality.

However, two events changed the course of ABC’s fate.

The David Frost-Aidan Crawley London Television Consortium (later London Weekend) was bright, intelligent, cultured, and promised much for the future, and under the ITA’s ethos that the system had to be open to newcomers, the LTC were awarded the weekend contract for the capital that had been ABC’s by right.

Secondly, Rediffusion had, for a long time, appeared to be creating a number of problems between themselves and the ITA, culminating in an interview that was disastrous for them.

The Authority then decided to suggest that a joint company to provide London with a weekday service could be devised from the resources of Rediffusion and ABC.

This was Thames Television.

New ITV contractors needed to sign up the best talent they can find, as well as devising ratings-winning programmes, so as to establish a reputation for quality.

Thames had an advantage over all the new companies, as well as many of the older ones, in that they could develop new programme strands as well as incorporate elements from the outputs of both ABC (showbusiness, drama) and Rediffusion (current affairs, children’s and schools programmes).

They also had a number of artists on contract, ensuring that they had access to creative talent, and technical expertise and experience.

Added to this, they had Teddington Studios, a riverside location that they would use to the full in years to come.

The share split in Thames – ABC 51%, Rediffusion 49% – inevitably effected a number of decisions made in the company to the point at which Thames was, effectively, ABC in disguise.

From the first day, Thames was attempting to establish a loyal audience by scheduling a brand-new magazine programme “Magpie”, guaranteeing that viewers would tune in by incorporating episodes of the “Captain Fantastic” serial into it – itself previously a feature of Rediffusion’s “Do Not Adjust Your Set”, soon to be revived by Thames.

Eamonn Andrews would now be the anchor of “Today”, from Monday-Thursday. “This Week” would continue. There were a few sitcoms, like “Never Mind the Quality, Feel The Width” that had begun in the ABC era, and “The Avengers”, “Callan” and “Public Eye” would be mainstays of Thames drama.

However, there was one disadvantage for the new company. The previous London weekday contract was for Monday-Friday, morning to closedown.

Now LWT had extra hours from Friday, 7pm to close, which meant that Thames had, at best, four evenings a week in which to build an audience and to gain vital advertising revenue.

This led to some oddities in scheduling: “Opportunity Knocks”, an ABC Saturday night talent show, was to be slotted into a 6.45 slot on Monday evenings.

Eamonn Andrews’ chat show, on which he had previously interviewed “Sunday Night People”, was scheduled for Thursday evenings.

“Just Jimmy” with the Clitheroe Kid himself had been moved from Saturday teatime, where it had been a family show, to Friday teatime, as a children’s show.

Over time, Thames planning staff worked out the best network slots for many of their programmes and out of the three mentioned, only “Opportunity Knocks” survived in its original Thames timeslot.

8pm Wednesday became the slot for variety specials and one-offs, drama was featured at 9pm, and 7pm became a time for sitcoms.

“Armchair Theatre” was moved into various places throughout the week, but never quite fitted, and never really regained its hard-won reputation: there were, however, attempts to update it, notably “Armchair Cinema”.

In June 1974, “Regan” was shown in this strand, to unanimous praise, and this film led to commissions for “The Sweeney”. “Armchair Cinema” later became “Armchair Thriller”, and was allowed to disappear from the screen forever.

One thing that should never be overlooked is that Thames, with roots in ABC and connections to EMI could make use of those relationships to the full. Thames were able to reap rewards from cinema films of “Callan”, “Sweeney!” and “Sweeney 2” and, most lucratively, “The Best of Benny Hill” – made for very little, using video-to-film transfer of the best of the early Thames series.

The best years of Thames were probably from its inception to 1979, when there was still a great deal of the ABC staffing on board and when production values were maintained at a high level.

They had signed most of the major talent, such as Morecambe and Wise, Tommy Cooper, Mike Yarwood and Kenny Everett, and had won a number of international awards.

The company was also about to make significant inroads into the US, thanks to Don Tuffnell’s sales of “The Benny Hill Show” and an entire week of programmes shown in the USA in September 1976. It might also be true to say that Thames lost their way in trying to establish themselves as world players.

What a pity that at yet another ITV franchise round, the company lost its contract to Carlton.

The legacy of Thames lives on now in both the name of an independent production company and an archive of programmes that has continued to be shown, frequently, on satellite and terrestrial television.

These programmes show, to both those who saw them first time around and to younger viewers just discovering them, that Thames had plenty of grace and style – qualities that both ABC and Rediffusion had in endless supply.

Not at all a bad thing.

The post Take me to the river appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.

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.

Rainbow, the pre-school children’s programme, has received worldwide praise for its pioneering documentary films for pre-school children. The latest in this occasional series, designed to introduce the youngest viewers to traumatic aspects of growing up, showed the arrival of a new member to the family, in Rainbow Has a New Baby.

‘Rainbow produces another fascinating look at the toddlers this evening. There’s an “ooooh” in every shot as three-year-old Dominic North – a smashing cherub – learns to live with an interloper in the house, his new sister Felicity. There is a great deal of illuminating observation in Charles Warren’s production. These programmes may be aimed at under-fives, but they prove irresistible to adults, too.’

Daily Express

Straight into the London Top Ten in third position, the summer series of Get Some In! continued the success story of Tony Selby and his ‘erks’ from the RAF.

For the first time, marriage guidance counsellors and their clients were filmed in the throes of consultation, in Nick Broomfield’s often disturbing and intimate film Marriage Guidance. Subsequently, he was invited to tour American colleges, to show and talk about the film.

Ken Ashton’s Lonely Hearts portrayed the problems of loneliness in our big cities through the eyes of ten young people, all of them desperate for friendship.

The Ruth Ellis Story, by Chris Goddard, looked back two decades to one of the most controversial postwar murder trials, that of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain.

Frank Cvitanovich combined newsreel film, Japanese propaganda footage and specially-shot material to recreate The Hunting of Force Z, the story of how the Japanese hunted and finally sank the battleships ‘Repulse’ and ‘Prince of Wales’ in 1941. Sir Michael Redgrave was narrator.

Michael Aspel narrated Joan Aiken’s Mice and Mendelson, a lunchtime story series for children about a group of mice and a pony named Mendelson.

Secret experiments in a laboratory lead to a mysterious murder: Whodunnit? asked Jon Pertwee, in the first of a new series of the successful early-evening panel show. Magnus Pyke, Bill Pertwee, Tessa Wyatt, Jimmy Jewell, Connie Booth and Alfred Marks were among the guesting sleuths.

Tom O’Connor, described by The Stage as ‘the sort of compere the old masters at the Palladium would be proud of,’ took the television variety show back to a theatre setting, and straight back to the top of the National Top Twenty with Night Out at the London Casino. With audiences of up to 14¼ million, the show followed the chart-topping format of the established Wednesday at Eight, including the Name That Tune audience contest. Guests in this entertainment highlight for ITVs summer season included Tommy Cooper, Twiggy, Norman Wisdom, Mike and Bernie Winters and Frankie Howerd.

The months between the end of Today, and the start in September of its successor Thames at 6, vacated the 6.00pm slot for new series. Allan Hargreaves turned quizmaster for The London Quiz, in which teams from London schools pitted their knowledge of London, past and present, in a knock-out tournament. Monty Modlyn returned with A Town Called; among the towns he visited were Chatham, Hampstead, Guildford, and Dinard in France. Get Out and Push was a series of half-hour documentaries about ordinary people who are committed to helping others – neither famous nor rich, their only motive being that they want to help. In Mavis, Mavis Nicholson met six people, first in their home and then in the studio, to discuss topics of special interest to them – from Barbara Cartland on girls’ morals, via John Aspinall on the dignity of animals, to John Mortimer pleading for more freedom of choice. And in preparation for the coming soccer season, Brough Scott returned with Sportscene, reviewing London’s sports.

Exactly one year after a chemical cloud escaped from a factory in Seveso, Italy, John Fielding returned to make a shock This Week Special: Seveso, the Poison Cloud. He revealed a state of maladministration which had allowed the poison to continue spreading, while failing to protect the victims of the disaster.

The Miss Thames competition, and sporting events ranging from the Australia versus the Rest of the World Jubilee cricket match, and international soccer with England against Switzerland, to a series of darts matches, were covered by Thames’ Outside Broadcasts cameras in the late summer.

Rolf Harris returned with a new series of Quick on the Draw, and was also one of the guests in The David Nixon Show; others included in David’s guestlist were Ron Moody, Ray Allen and Lord Charles, Diana Dors and Anita Harris.

This Week produced disturbing evidence that 8000 pounds of MUF nuclear material unaccounted for – were potentially on the illegal world arms market. Llew Gardner, joining the programme from Today, reported on a little-aired crisis, that of Quebec nationalism, in The French Disconnection.

Early in 1977, Orient Street, London SE11 was stripped of its television aerials and double yellow lines, as producer Paul Knight transformed it into Dulcimer Street in 1938 – setting for London Belongs to Me, a drama series based on Norman Collins’ internationally best-selling novel about London and Londoners during the early years of World War II. Derek Farr, Madge Ryan, Patricia Hayes, Peter Jeffrey and Terence Budd starred.

‘Few successful novels become successful TV series. The Thames adaptation of Norman Collins’ best-selling novel London Belongs to Me looks like the exception. Collins’ wry sympathy with his characters has been skilfully transferred to the TV series by writer Hugh Leonard and producer Paul Knight. There are excellent performances by Terence Budd as Percy Boon, Peter Jeffrey as Mr Squales and Patricia Hayes as Connie Coke.’

Sunday Times

‘A long overdue recognition of sub-Dickensian literary artifact that is made for television. It has a large cast of fascinating characters – what the trade calls a “human story.”. Hugh Leonard sticks close to the novel, stressing the essential “ordinariness” of Collins’ extraordinary people, with every part a cameo and every cameo well carved in sharp relief. The design and mise-en-scene are admirable and the direction efficiently unobtrusive.’

Broadcast

‘What’s different about this telly period drama is that it’s funny – which period dramas, in general, are not. The series is as tasty, and nutty, as a fruitcake.’

Daily Mirror

Two years after it began as a five-minute insert. Help! became a daily programme in September, expanding from volunteer recruitment to include information on health, employment and welfare rights. By Christmas over 15,000 enquiries were received by the programme, many requesting specially-produced publications: ‘Help Yourself to London,’ a listing of facilities and opportunities for pensioners produced in co-operation with Age Concern (Greater London), was sent to 8,000 viewers. Gordon Honeycombe read the news in Hindustani (illustrating the language problems of home-hound Asian women), Cilia Black spoke about losing her baby, and Instant Sunshine even sang a special song on curing the Christmas hangover, as Help! used different forms of presentation to illustrate their topics. The year of Help! ended with an appeal for wool and unwanted woollens to make patchwork blankets – a mile-long strip of wool and 5,000 jumpers were the result.

This Week returned to Ireland, with a remarkable secret film made in the Maze prison, and an investigation into the RUC’s interrogation techniques; while at home, Peter Williams reported on the threat of a footballers’ strike.

Michael Robbins, Nigel Lambert, Mike Savage and Lynda Bellingham starred as the hilariously ineffective crime-fighting force of a small, outer London police station in The Fuzz, a new situation comedy by ‘Budgie’ creator Willis Hall.

Six months in the making on location in Amsterdam, Euston Films’ new production of Van der Valk went straight into the Network Top Ten, and quickly found a permanent place there with up to 14¼ million viewers. Barry Foster returned as the Dutch detective, joined by a new wife, Joanna Dunham and Nigel Stock as his police boss. Multiple car chases, dramatic effects and stunts injected Euston Films’ trademark of high action into the already familiar character and format. ‘Mike Vardy’s direction is quite exceptional’ the Daily Express reported on the first episode; ‘the series serves a very unusual place in the area of the TV sleuth. It is unorthodox and full of extremely good performances, with Barry Foster filling the bill completely’

Half a million sales of Rainbows, packs designed to reflect the Rainbow series, were topped during 1977. Sold in 23 countries, these have proved Thames’ most successful programme-related publishing venture, and in August a similar series of activity packs relating to Magpie were also launched. Other merchandise in the year ranged from jigsaws based on Cosgrove Hall’s cartoon series, to a silver disc for the Rock Follies of ’77 record.

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

‘In the first “This Sporting Land” Wynford Vaughan Thomas gives a witty, learned and thoroughly enjoyable account of the history and current idiosyncrasies of cricket. It’s a gem of a programme and will beguile even the most fervent disliker of the game’

Sunday Times

‘The narration, by Wynford Vaughan Thomas, is a mixture of acid, irony, mockery and straight reportage. Each programme will certainly hold the attention. They are entertaining, informative and humorous!’

Times Educational Supplement

ON 12 SEPTEMBER THAMES LAUNCHED TWO MAJOR NEW DAILY PROGRAMMES,
THAMES AT 6 AND AFTER NOON

Former ITN newscaster Andrew Gardner introduced Thames at 6, a 6.00pm report on London and its day. The production was structured to bring more hard, regional news coverage, and more deeply probing investigations, to the traditional Today function. Within the first month these aims began to be realised, with interviews with Jim Slater and the Minister for Health, special investigations into the Luton murder and the drug Primados, and on the lighter side, Kenny Everett’s zany music reviews hinted at what is to come when Kenny;s own series starts on Thames during 1978.

‘The word has clearly gone out that no-one is going to be allowed to get away with anything. The brief bursts of questioning are ultra-tough. (The first week has) managed already by turns to illuminate, to irritate and to celebrate’

Times

After Noon was a recasting of its successful predecessor Good Afternoon, broadening the outlook from traditional women’s subjects’ to greater coverage of the arts, politics, education, medicine and social questions, alongside the personality interviews and magazine features.

In its first weeks, After Noon went on location with reports on the Tate Gallery’s ‘Save the Stubbs’ campaign (with an interview with Arts Minister Lord Donaldson), and on life in high rise blocks. Personality interviews included Mary Parkinson with Pierre Cardin, Judith Chalmers with James Herriot, Elaine Grand meeting Lord Shinwell, Mavis Nicholson holding the first-ever TV interview with current pop sensation Elvis Costello, followed shortly by Morecambe and Wise.

Straight into the national ratings in second place, John Alderton’s first situation comedy series for Thames, The Upchat Line, revolved around Mike Upchat, a freewheeling man about town. ‘We don’t know what he does for a living,’ Alderton explained. ‘Sometimes he says he’s a writer but at other times he claims to be anything from a psychologist to a piano tuner.’

‘The Upchat Line, written by Keith Waterhouse and featuring John Alderton, marks something of a welcome and enterprising departure from the old routine. For this is comedy refined down to a quieter, more relaxed level with some nicely polished lines doing the work of the usual mad antics, and a real star performance from one of the best light comedy actors around today. It is all done with great panache and style, with Mr Alderton giving a deceptively easy performance, casually putting together all the little bits of business, and underplaying and drawling his lines but timing everything with split second precision.

Mr Waterhouse has put together a script tailored to suit him to perfection, and also to provide Thames with a fresh and obviously rewarding range of comedy.’

Daily Telegraph

‘Hilarious new comedy series in which John Alderton proves his comic talent as a would-be writer who spends most of his life trying to find somewhere to lay his head – and his birds. Looks very promising (though not for the husbands!).’

Sunday Mirror

After a summer trip to Spain filming inserts for future programmes, Magpie returned with a new presenter to join the team of Jenny Hanley and Mick Robertson: 24-year-old ex-LBC news director Tommy Boyd, selected from 2,000 applicants. Here’s how the London Evening News welcomed the programme back:

‘The most entertaining and informative children’s programme on television is Magpie, on Thames. Jenny Hanley is extremely attractive and has a presence and authority that enthralls the children. The producers go to remarkable lengths and not a little expense in bringing strange and unusual items to the programme, and whether the kiddies realise ft or not, they are being educated as well as entertained. Magpie is an intelligent show, and also has a fine record in obtaining money for children’s charities.’

Evening News

Originally made as a schools programme, Superman and the Bride’s outspoken survey of how we are conditioned by the media (especially television and film) reached the adult audience in October. Its blend of documentary and revue was described as ‘a refreshing TV breakthrough’ by the Daily Mail.

‘Eight years of the average viewer’s life is spent in front of the box. In that time each one should be forced to spend forty-five minutes watching Superman and the Bride for it is the most intelligent and important appraisal yet produced of the images fed to us by the mass media.’

TimeOut

‘As one of the vox pop interviewees said, you’ve got to overstate a case to make it effectively, and this was the jolliest, zippiest overstatement of a case that badly needs making – energetically, and again and again. It could well prompt further pieces of televisual self-scrutiny. It was itself replete with delicious ironies, notably its unabashed use of advertising techniques as a way of attacking advertising techniques, and also its mere presence on our screens – which is living proof that the “system” can be penetrated.’

The Times

A television appearance by Tommy Steele is a rare event, and to celebrate his twenty-first year in showbusiness (Tommy’s first hit, ‘Rock With the Caveman’, coincided with the first year of ITV) he came to Thames for Tommy Steele and a Show. It was a mammoth production, with producer/director Keith Beckett pulling every trick from videotape technology, to interpret the ‘Show’ as devised by Tommy and written by Eric Merriman. For an hour of music, dance and magic effects, Tommy Steele held the spotlight, and more than 14 million people watched the programme.

‘This in one of the very best light entertainment shows I’ve seen on television. Apart from its star – the eternally appealing Tommy who celebrates his 21st year in show business – the programme uses the latest electronic devices for some stunning visual effects, has all the slick glamour and razmatazz of a Hollywood musical, and imaginative, precision, ballet routines worthy of a Busby Berkeley film’

Daily Express

‘Give ’em the old razzle-dazzle’ sang the star on ITV’s Tommy Steele and a Show, and he certainly did. During his all-singing, all-dancing special it was hard to realise that Tommy was celebrating his 21st year in show business.

With his boyish exuberance and appealing charisma, Tommy delivered a delightful hour of sheer escapism, a welcome opportunity for us to sit back and enjoy his wide-ranging talents’

Evening News

Drama Controller Verity Lambert personally produced The Norman Conquests, Alan Ayckbourn’s West End stage sensation which, according to the Daily Mail, ‘transferred superbly from stage to television’. 11 million viewers shared the disastrous weekend of family argument, which was directed by Herbert Wise as three two-hour plays.

‘The Norman Conquests was a triumph and a treat, Alan Ayckbourn’s tragi-comic trilogy being not only funny but graced by universally accomplished performances. Tom Conti was allowed to let off the fireworks, so to speak, as Norman. But he was matched by Richard Briers’ Reg, often speaking volumes with a soundless double-take; or Penelope Keith, Fiona Walker and Penelope Wilton as the women. Not forgetting David Troughton, in making a gormless bore into a believable, even fascinating person. Just as the action moved from room to room, so the focus shifted, play by play, to different characters, none of whom gave short measure.

A Rolls-Royce of a project, coachbuilt and splendidly engineered.’

Daily Mail

‘The Norman Conquests must be one of the best and funniest things on screen. It justified ITV’s bold decision to give it a total of six hours peak viewing. The plays explore the same weekend in the life of a bickering family from three different viewpoints in witty dialogue as well-honed as a surgeon’s scalpel.’

The Daily Mirror

1976 had marked a unique achievement by Thames when both the drama and documentary Prix Italia awards were won by, respectively, The Naked Civil Servant and Beauty, Bonny, Daisy, Violet, Grace and Geoffrey Morton. In 1977, a clean sweep of this international event was completed, when the third category, music, came to Thames for the St Nicolas Cantata. Benjamin Britten’s musical setting of the Father Christmas story was recorded on location at St Albans’ Cathedral and first transmitted at Christmas 1976.

Meanwhile, the Royal Television Society voted Nick Downie News Feature Cameraman of the year for his This Week programme, ‘War in the Sahara’ – the fourth consecutive year that This Week had won an RTS award.

In October Outside Broadcasts covered the Britannia Awards, the first British awards for popular music, featuring several major acts headed by the reunited Simon and Garfunkel. OBs followed a different kind of entertainment award hunt in the series of Pub Entertainer of the Year, hosted by Frank Carson, which ended in December with 14 million viewers watching the grand final. The England v Italy World Cup soccer match at Wembley was screened to 16 million viewers. Preceding Thames’ match coverage, Sportscene flew Italy’s Giorgio Chinaglia from America to preview the game prospects with Bobby Moore, Terry Venables and other experts.

Vince Powell’s situation comedy Odd Man Out introduced John Inman as fish-and-chip shop owner Neville Sutcliffe, who inherits half of a stick-rock factory in Sussex. Josephine Tewson played his step-sister and factory co-owner, Dorothy, who shared the problems, arguments and laughs of running the business.

To mark the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the USSR, Thames transmitted Hammer and Sickle, an intensively researched history from the 1917 Revolution through the stormy decades of Lenin, Stalin and Krushchev to the present. Producer Martin Smith traced many unique pieces of film of Stalin’s terror chief Beria, of life inside a gulag, of the Czech invasion as filmed by the Russian troops. The two-hour production was written by Neal Ascherson and narrated by Paul Scofield.

Denis Norden returned for the seventh series of Looks Familiar in October. One of daytime television’s most popular programmes, guests for the new series included Tony Curtis, Charlie Drake, Annie Ross, John Junkin, Elaine Stritch and Michael Parkinson.

As ITV’s schools programming entered its third decade, Thames, the single biggest contributor to the network, launched two major new strands to the curriculum. French Studies, for 13- to 16-year-olds, began with five documentaries on aspects of French life, and a series of actuality film sequences shot in France. The English Programme presented new two-part productions of outstanding, published TV plays – Julia Jones’ ‘The Piano’, and Barry Hines’ ‘Speech Day’, followed by a film documentary on the work of Barry Hines. Both programmes were designed to run through a full year’s course, unlike the normal single-term compass of television school’s programming.

‘Ask a friend whether he watched the first Time for Business and before you can add “Pretty much like the other business programmes” he forestalls you with wildly enthusiastic praise of – say – the section on franchising, pointing out how highly original it was,’ wrote Chris Dunkley in the Financial Times. Not to be like the other comparable programmes was important in formulating Time for Business. Eamonn Andrews was a presenter for the layman, not the expert. He explained: ‘people are becoming more sophisticated about the uses of their own money and want to understand what makes the world of business tick. My job, with expert back-up, is to understand that myself, because if I do, so will the ordinary viewer.’

Broadcast live, the programmes gave an hour of film report and studio presentation of business, manufacturing, and the city. Alongside news, information and advice for the big and small investor alike, a more important, broader aim was access to the world of business – ’Allow us into your boardrooms and factories,’ producer James Butler said in a launch speech to high-ranking businessmen. ‘I would like to see us become as familiar a sight around the businesses of Britain as television is at football matches.’ Among those present was Sir Charles Forte who responded, ‘I think Eamonn Andrews will make people watch. There’s an aura of the unknown about business which I think he can break down. If the programme can show how good relationships in business generally are, that will be a great achievement.’

Time for Business was launched with a ‘development capital competition’, designed to illustrate the investment problems of small businesses. The programme offered to make available up to £250,000 for the best investment proposal submitted. The range of responses has already been enormous, from a new glass-lining process for furnaces, to a design for a racing cycle, to a methodist minister who wants to build a new church. So far, audiences have averaged ¾ million – more than the combined daily circulation of the Guardian and Times.

‘Proof positive that money programmes need not be above the heads of the ordinary viewer.’

The Times

There was a stir in the sixteenth, final series of Opportunity Knocks! when Hughie Green introduced a contestant with his face masked by a paper bag. It was explained that this was a one-time teenage idol who now preferred anonymity. He turned out to be P J Proby who was voted into second place by the viewers.

Prince Charles donned a Magpie badge when he was filmed with Mick Robertson at Dunraven Castle in Wales. He joined in the work of a group of Cardiff children, who are clearing waste land for a country park under the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Fund. The 1977 Magpie Christmas appeal for children with brittle bones ran through December and topped the record figure of £250,000.

Thames at 6‘s investigation unit discovered two identical pairs of boots in neighbouring West End shops – also they found a threefold difference in price. For three days the programme pursued the investigation. On the third day, a public apology admitted the expensive boots had been overpriced. They were finally on sale at a fifth of their original price.

Wednesday at Eight‘s winter run jumped into the charts in fifth position. With guest stars like Frankie Vaughan and Max Bygraves, the ratings steadily increased, to settle in December to a regular Network audeince of 18 million.

West German terrorism, secret film of Chile under Pinochet, and reports from Spain and Portugal were covered by This Week towards the year’s end. ‘A Miserable and Lonely Death,’ This Week’s scoop reconstruction of the Steve Biko inquest, was widely praised and has since been adapted for stage production by the Royal Shakespeare Company with Ian McKellen in the main role.

Thames made a large contribution to ITV’s post-Christmas holiday entertainment. Max’s Holiday Hour brought Max Bygraves, Lena Zavaroni and Charlie Cairoli to an audience of nearly 15 millions, and there were two innovative musical pairings when Vera Lynn joined George Shearing, and Peggy Lee shared the spotlight with Charles Aznavour. The Queen’s Racehorses, on Boxing Day, was a totally informal film portrait of H.M. the Queen, talking about and seen with the horses she so loves.

Repeats of Man About the House had regularly topped the ratings during the summer, and the programme’s first offshoot George and Mildred jumped back into the Top Five with a new series, again starring Brian Murphy and Yootha Joyce. With audiences as high as 19.7 million, it was the most popular comedy series on British television in 1977.

‘The funniest and best socially observed comedy of the year’

‘As long as the stars retain their enthusiasm and the writers keep up the mixture of crisp one-liners. cross-purposes encounters and an undercurrent of mild sauciness … it could run for years.’

Daily Mail

‘With a splendidly direct approach, the series has a commendable lack of coyness,’ the Daily Mirror commented on the late-night Problems. Jenny Conway and Tony Bastable were the reporters, on adult sexual problems.

The green, furry, multi-legged Wotsit from Whizzbang made his TV debut in Rainbow, where his zany, fantastic adventures proved so popular that in November he began his own children’s series. Joe Lynch narrated Samantha Lee’s stories.

Michael Whyte, a new director to Thames’ documentary department, spent eighteen months investigating the nationwide problem of Britain’s violent and severely disordered children. The result was a disturbing, at times shocking trilogy of films. 17-year-old Billy was on trial for grievous bodily harm when the first film was made; Jimmy has been in care since the age of twelve, when he attacked his mother with a bread knife; and the third film, Aycliffe, visited a treatment centre for extremely disordered children.

‘Do you like hitting people Jimmy?’
‘If they deserve it, yeah.’
‘Do you ever hit your friends?’
‘If they shout “Chelsea!” or things like that.’
‘But why?’
‘Because there’s nothing else to do these days, is there?’

15-year-old ‘Jimmy,’ the subject of the second of three films on violent children.

John Thaw and Dennis Waterman’s first Sweeney film earned them both awards, as best actor and most promising male newcomer respectively, in the Evening News Film Awards, covered for ITV by Thames. 1978 will see the fourth, final TV series of The Sweeney, and also the second Sweeney feature film.

The post Autumn 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.

Raymond Aron

Sir Isaiah Berlin

Anthony Crosland

Paul Foot

Denis Healey

Sir Keith Joseph

Enoch Powell

Brian Abel-Smith

James Baldwin

Bishop Butler

Lord Devlin

J.K. Galbraith

Roy Jenkins

Herbert Marcuse

Shirley Williams

Talking about ITV2

“All the people named above have spoken this year in a single Thames Television series. The series, which brings important intellectual debate to a wide public, was the first on British television to give its participants proper time to develop their arguments and ideas. Hence the eminent authorities it has attracted and continues to attract.

Some people may be surprised to find that such series are made by an ITV company. And perhaps they are right to be surprised. For the imagination and professionalism of Thames’ programme staff has far too few outlets on the present single channel. Their many ideas for serious minority programmes cannot possibly receive sufficient screen time, especially as ITV is always opposed by the combined forces of BBC1 and BBC2.

Nevertheless, towards the day when additional channels provide further opportunities, Thames will go on devoting the largest possible proportion of its output to serious and informative television.”

HOWARD THOMAS, Managing Director

THAMES

today • this week • good afternoon •  something to say • treasures of the british museum
the second world war (in production) • documentaries including we was all one (winner 1972 Prix Italia)
my brother david (winner 1972 UNICEF award) • adult education and schools programmes

Thames Television, 306-316 Euston Road, London NW1 3BB

The post Talking about ITV2 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post People behind programmes: Jeremy Issacs appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.

It’s 10 months since Thames Television came to London.

What difference has it made?

To the London ITV audience?

It’s grown. Grown, for Thames’ evening programmes, by an average of 200,000 homes. That’s more than 14% up on last year.

The facts: Thames transmits to the London ITV area from Monday to 7.00 pm on Friday. In Spring last year before Thames began, audiences between 6.30 and 10.30 on those days averaged 1,309,280 homes*. This year, Thames has boosted the average to 1,497,600 homes.

Outside those peak viewing hours, the average audience for the same period in 1968 was 818,300 homes. This year the average Thames audience was 873,600 homes: and increase of over 6%.

So after less than a year, and despite a difficult start, Thames is consistently attracting more viewers than the Spring 1968 average:

*Comparisons over eight weeks ending 3 May 1968/2 May 1969

To London ITV programmes?

They’ve changed. To help win these bigger audiences, Thames has introduced new programmes to London in all three major fields: drama, light entertainment and features.

The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten has been the most successful documentary series ever to appear on the screen. Three new light entertainment programmes – Max, Two in Clover and Father, Dear Father – have regularly appeared in the London Top Ten list of most popular shows. (Max, starring Max Bygraves, topped the list three times.) Of the dramatic series, Callan has been exceptionally successful; Frontier was described by a leading critic as “the most promising of all efforts by the new ITV companies”; and The Mind of Mr J.G. Reeder has already become one of London’s favourite programmes. Among the new plays produced by Thames to date have been the Premiere series of live “first nights” and the widely-praised productions of Noël Coward’s “Star Quality” and Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Uncle Silas”.

Report, the new one-hour current affairs series, has already had three programmes chosen for the National Film Archive. And Today, first ever local programme for the London ITV area, is watched in more than a million homes five nights a week.

To children?

They’re beginning to like us. Last year they mostly watched the BBC, but not any more. For example Magpie, Thames’ magazine programme for London children, quickly became so popular that it went national, twice weekly. After only ten months on the air it’s watched by more families than the BBC’s excellent Blue Peter.

Mothers like us too (ask them) because we make a really wide range of children’s entertainment, from Sooty and Once Upon a Time to Do Not Adjust Your Set and The Tingaree Affair. That’s why all Thames’ programmes for children are more popular than last year’s counterparts.

To viewers all over Britain?

There’s a new name for good television. Since Thames began, its productions have won more places in the National Top Twenty than any other company. These nationally popular Thames programmes have included This Week, Opportunity Knocks, Callan, Max, Life With Cooper, The Avengers, Mike and Bernie’s Show, Two in Clover, Armchair Theatre and many others. More than a quarter of Thames’ places in the list have been filled by entirely new programmes.

To the BBC?

It comes second. From Monday to 7.00 on Friday, London viewers can choose between Thames, BBC1 and BBC2. The programmes they like best come from Thames. Each week we make a private check on the ten most popular programmes in London during our transmission time. The latest figures, for eight weeks ended 2 May, show that Thames had 78% of London’s ten weekday favourites against the BBC’s 22%.

We don’t usually publish our weekday top ten. But that’s how it looks.

To advertisers?

They’re getting more for their money. In terms of cost per thousand homes viewing, the latest available figures for eight weeks ending 2 May show that Thames’ peaktime rate gave an average cost of 19/1d [rounds to just under 95½p in decimal, £15.75 in 2018 allowing for inflation] per thousand homes – compared to 21/10d [rounds to about £1.09, £18 in 2018 allowing for inflation] in peaktime for the same period last year. The difference: 12½% cheaper on Thames.

(Because Thames’ peaktime rate covers an hour more than last year’s, the chart shows how the Thames cost compares with 1968’s 7.00 to 10.00 and 6.30 to 10.30. Thames is cheaper either way.)

To London’s skyline?

It’s altering. Thames’ new headquarter and colour studios are nearing completion close to the Post Office tower at Euston, ready for the start of colour broadcasting in November. From this new central complex, and from the riverside studios at Teddington, Thames will continue to produce outstanding programmes for London, for Britain and for the world.

That’s the promise we made ten months ago, and it’s one thing we haven’t changed.

THAMES

Television House, Kingsway, London WC2.

The post It’s 10 months since Thames Television came to London appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.