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

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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.

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Guthrie Moir, Controller of Educational and Religious Programmes
A Place in The Country, Ballet For All, Cooking Price-Wise, Cooking Without Tears, The Craftsmen, The Garden Indoors, Living Architects, Living Writers, Looking At Antiques, Treasures of the British Museum, Last Programme, Challenge, Evidence, Finding Out, Images, Le Butin de Colombert, Let’s Go Out, Seeing and Doing, Song and Story, This is Life, The World Around Us, Writer’s Workshop, You and the World, Drama including Macbeth.

Guthrie Moir, Thames Television’s Controller of Educational and Religious Programmes, has been an ITV producer in these fields since 1958. A former President of the World Assembly of Youth, he is a member of the Council of Reading University and of the General Synod of the Church of England.

I always think I’m very lucky to be in Thames’ department of educational and religious programmes, because more often than not I find I’m working on things in which I and my colleagues have a particular interest. This is not to say that we tackle only subjects which appeal to us, but being a relatively small department in a big television company we do tend to be rather more specialised than others.

However we try to be as comprehensive as possible, and this is certainly true of our weekday schools programmes which cover the whole range of pupils. But this unique weekday aspect of our contract sometimes restricts my other two sections, adult education and religion. The weekend is the time when all ITV Network programmes in these two fields go on the air, and we alone can never produce an adult education or religious series and be sure of simultaneous national transmission. We had the rather absurd business just recently of Thames having produced a major series, treasures of the british museum, which although it was eventually taken by all the ITV companies had no guarantee of this at the outset. This is a great drawback, of course, because it means that the Board has to be ready to back any of the series I choose to put on with absolutely no certainty that the other companies will buy them. Each time Thames finances a project like the Museum programmes or our new series on National Trust houses, a place in the country, it is a great act of faith on their part. For this reason I am even more anxious than the most fervent of my colleagues to have a second channel in which to expand and experiment more widely.

But we already do far more than we are obliged to by the terms of our contract. As one example, Thames produces well over an hour of religious programmes a week when there is no obligation to produce any at all. I think the company can honestly be proud that in the London region at least there is a daily permanent place in the schedule for religion. It is often said, of course, that these programmes are too short and too late at night to be really meaningful. But on a good night our last programme will be seen by at least as many people as will go to church in the whole of the Thames area on Sunday, so it is not an entirely negligible congregation.

This is also reflected in the volume of correspondence that the programmes draw. I am much too exhausted myself at that time of night to feel like writing letters to a producer, whether his programme excites or infuriates me. But people do have the energy to write in and make positive suggestions, and we do our best to put their ideas into practice. One of the results of this has been the disappearance of the sermonette late at night, which probably did more harm than good to the churches. This sort of preaching at people has, I am glad to say, been replaced by the easy give and take of discussions and a variety of formats embracing all the arts.

We are fortunate not only in this direct contact with our viewers but also in our professional advisers. We are very much indebted both to our religious advisory panel of the Reverend Austen Williams, Father Michael Hollings and Dr. Kenneth Greet, and to our educational advisory council under the chairmanship of Lord Evans of Hungershall, whose advice in schools series is invaluable.

The schools section is the largest part of my department, and Thames has inherited the structure and some of the people who actually started schools television on a national scale in 1957 – a term before the BBC, in fact. We set out to provide more than just a support for the teacher, but to make demands on both him and his pupils. In Charles Warren I have an executive producer whose contribution in this field has been outstanding. And each series has a fully qualified education officer attached to it who works alongside the director, helps prepare the programmes and visits schools to see how they are being received. He spends almost as much time in the classroom or at teachers’ meetings as he does in the studios.

We see ourselves as an important part of the educational effort in this country. We produce more schools series than any other ITV company, and they are seen in 25,000 schools. They range from the regular infant series like seeing and doing and finding out to social studies for teenagers such as evidence and you and the world. We also make a great deal of drama for schools: classical and modem plays, dramatised history, even a thriller in French. And one programme we are particularly proud of is writer’s workshop, which has been highly praised and which has stimulated creative writing in a remarkable way. All these are made to the same standards, and with the same resources, as Thames’ other programmes.

The same applies to adult education, where my executive producer Marjory Ruse and I are trying to give London ITV viewers as wide a variety as possible. In addition to the arts programmes, living writers, the craftsman, ballet for all, treasures of the british museum, there are innumerable popular practical series on domestic subjects like cooking, indoor gardening, inexpensive collecting and interior decoration.

Above all we feel that our series must be regarded in the context of other broadcasting, and must stand up to the same criteria. They must aim to be as interesting and entertaining as other programmes. We don’t want to produce programmes for a tiny in-group minority. We want them to compel the attention of the viewer, at home or at school, and to be informative without being boring. From the welter of ideas that pour into my office daily from my team, from viewers’ letters, from advisers, and from conversations in trains and buses and tubes and lifts, we hope we pick out the ones that will attract and help the broadest cross-section of our fellow citizens from the very young to the very old. Every idea put up to us is carefully considered. But we are always conscious that in these areas of science and educational and religious searching, demand seems perpetually to exceed the possibilities of supply.

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