★

We start the day with a trip to ITN in London. In various periods, the ITV companies had repeated programmes from last week’s ‘Sunday Session’ in the space before actual programmes began on Saturday. Not today.

Saturday Sportstime (1.20pm) This was the replacement for Let’s Go, which had started as a strange mix of sport, entertainment and magazine features in its first series, then begun to focus much more heavily on sport in its second.

ITV’s sports output was often the dregs. Given the choice, most sports preferred not to be televised at all, lest the attraction of sitting on your own sofa at home to watch outweighed the need to go to the grounds or stadium and pay an entrance fee. Second choice was for the sport to appear on the BBC, quite possibly because the viewers were thought to be of a ‘better class’. ITV came a poor third, which is why there are such minority pursuits as tenpin bowling, basketball and wrestling on offer today.

The tenpin bowling coverage on ITV on weekends usually came from an ABC Weekend Bowl (which were open during the week as well, strangely), former cinemas converted to bowling alleys by ABC TV’s owner, the Associated British Picture Corporation, who owned the ABC Cinema chain. Today, Rank, owner of ABC Cinema’s rival network, Odeon/Gaumont, are getting in on the act via their converted Odeon in Southall. Since we’re in south London, ATV wheels out the OB units and the commentator, their announcer Shaw Taylor.

Wrestling was usually an hour from 4pm, so we can only assume it was a slack day for other sports that needed filling with today’s hour and 35 minutes. The wrestling was nearly always an ABC contribution, making it something of a speciality for them. Kent Walton, of Associated-Rediffusion, was the long-serving commentator, which helped ABC sell a wrestling highlights packed to A-R for networking on Wednesday nights, under the banner of “Independent Television presents”. 

The line “Televising some or all of the following bouts” is wonderfully vague. Tough luck if you’ve tuned in to see your favourite wrestler and he’s not one of the ones selected.

Space Patrol (5.15pm) Roberta Leigh and Arthur Provis had branched out from Gerry Anderson’s organisation – Provis was the ‘P’ in APF – and set up on their own. With ABC’s backing, although it was not an ABC production by ITA rules, they made three series, 39 episodes, of what some critics called a low-budget Fireball XL5. It hasn’t received the love and adoration that the Anderson series have garnered, possibly because, like the live-action Emerald Soup the year before and the awful US import Lost in Space the year after, it was steamrollered into oblivion by Doctor Who over on BBCtv.

Thank Your Lucky Stars (5.50pm) Coming from the Alpha Television Services studios in Aston, near Birmingham, you might think that it was hard work to get stars in to sing. You’d be wrong. At first, ABC lavished cash on the stars’ agents to get them to come up from London for the show. Later, the show became so huge that the agents were queuing to get their clients on air.

The format was a pretty standard one: an audience of teens listened along to various stars singing (or miming) in the studio. But ABC added more than the rival Ready, Steady, Go! and Top of the Pops and the like by including not just chart toppers but potentially up-and-coming bands (The Cresters here being much more heavy on the potential than the up-and-coming bit) and by having local girl Janice Nicholls with her heavy Black Country accent leading a team deciding on points to give the latest American 45s – perhaps the only place you’d hear such music in Europe outside of AFN unless it actually charted here.

Another addition was a guest disc jockey, brought in each week to help Radio Luxembourg’s Brian Matthew present the recorded music they played out. Tonight it’s Desmond Carrington, at this point most famous as an actor in Emergency – Ward 10, but an audiophile in his own right. He would go on from here to hosting his own much-missed show on the Light Programme and Radio 2.

Big Night Out (6.35pm) Howard Thomas of ABC and Lew Grade of ATV spent the entire period between 1956 and 1981 bickering, if Thomas’s autobiography is anything to go by. He accused Grade of wanting to programme the entire weekend with his dross and let ABC pay for it. Thomas wanted ABC, which on weekends was two thirds larger than ATV, to have at least two thirds of the programming pie, which ATV contribute to.

To get anywhere with this on-going row, Thomas needed ABC to have a like-for-like replacement available for any ATV show, preventing Grade from holding him hostage by taking away ATV’s big hitters as a negotiating tactic. Big Night Out is one example of this. Here it’s a fun 50 minutes early on a Saturday evening. But it can be easily moved to Sundays at 8.25pm without the viewers complaining that they’ve lost their fix of famous people doing variety on the Palladium show. Big Night Out on Saturdays was transformed into Blackpool Night Out on Sundays later for exactly that reason.

Howard Thomas’s policy here eventually gave ABC great leverage over ATV London. When negotiations on something for the weekend went sour, he could swap out ABC’s own programmes for ATV ones, and also deny ATV something they really wanted – The Avengers often ended up on a weekday on Rediffusion, just out of Grade’s grasp, quite possibly mainly as punishment.

Interestingly, Thomas couldn’t remain angry or annoyed at Grade. Nobody could. A stand-up row at Great Cumberland Street, Hanover Square or even, in very bad times, at the ITA in Knightsbridge, was over in minutes due to Lew never bearing a grudge. They’d be spitting venom at each other in an office one minute, and the next Lew would be on the phone to Howard to tell him about the very famous person he had just met and how wonderful they were and perhaps we should do a show with them and wouldn’t that be fun and… well, how do you stay angry with that?

Sergeant Cork (7.25pm) Earlier in the 1960s, the ITA had decided that programmes produced by ATV under the ITC banner could no longer count as ATV productions for the purposes of deciding network quotas and general brownie points with the Authority. If it was on film, it was mostly likely aimed at foreign markets, so claiming such programmes as ATV’s own was not to happen any more. (Curiously, when ABC switched The Avengers from video to film, and began to heavily market it abroad, the ITA was not so much concerned, going as far as allowing ABC’s successor Thames to claim the final series of The Avengers as its own despite having exactly zero input into it.)

ATV’s response was to make a couple of series of things on 405-line video, and gamble that the resulting telerecordings on to film would be good enough for foreign purchasers to turn a blind eye to the picture quality. Sergeant Cork was one of these, a huge hit in the UK across 6 series of 66 episodes, but also popular in the Commonwealth, if not so much in the 525-line colour USA.

The Avengers (9.10pm) We’re just over half way through Honor Blackman’s last series of the popular drama and its switch to black and white film and surrealism with Diana Rigg joining Patrick Macnee in the lead roles. Most notable about this episode, which is creepy but a bit clunky in places, is the presence of Barry Letts as Oliver in the cast. Yes, that Barry Letts, future showrunner of Doctor Who.

Espionage (10.10pm) As mentioned above about Sergeant Cork, here’s that ITA decision in action. Espionage started life as an ATV production on film. But it was aimed at an export market and had ITC’s fingers all over it, so off it went to ITC and it thus disappeared as a network show. What’s unusual here is that it’s on ABC, since ATV used the excuse of having to individually sell the series to each ITV company rather than networking it to show ITC series on ATV London at weekends and ATV Midlands on weekdays, freezing ABC out; the series could thus only be sold to Granada if it was to be seen in the North.

Yet here it is in the North and the Midlands on a Sunday, possibly reflecting its ATV roots. This episode isn’t a classic, as the series attracted quite a few names in guest star roles in other editions, including Millicent Martin, Joan Hickson and Pat Troughton.

Gazette (11.05pm) A general election was due at some point in 1964. The space between this election and the last one in 1959 had seen a new invention on television: satire. As biting satire does, it made the great and the good uncomfortable, even as they pretended to enjoy it.

The government thus leaned heavily on the broadcasters to knock it off until after the election, most famously leading to the death of That Was The Week That Was over on the BBC Television Service. The same pressure was brought to bear on the Independent Television Authority. The result was satirical sketches disappearing from ATV’s On The Braden Beat. For the other main programme that had a vein of satire running through it, ABC at Large, it caused the disappearance of the show.

But not of the stars and the producers and the general ethos. They returned with this series, ABC Gazette (as it appeared on screen), with the satire of the predecessor removed but handed to the band The Scaffold, who could be relied upon to make very cogent points hidden beneath the Merseybeat music and the clever lyrics of Roger McGough.

The great and the good would, at this time, be far less likely to listen to the pop music part of the show, and if they did, much more likely to miss what was being aimed at them.

Personal Column (11.45pm) The pressure on the broadcasters to avoid satire and other comment in the run up to a general election gave ABC the opportunity to continue doing it but at one remove. A five-minute commentary after ABC Gazette allowed a firebreak for the ABC at Large crew – it’s not part of our programme, guv. Putting a newspaper journalist in the studio and giving him (it’s 1964, it’s a him) free rein allows ABC to put the satire and the commentary back into the slot, but to divorce themselves from the content. If you’ve got a problem with it, take it up with the journalist or his newspaper… which they won’t because you don’t want to do battle with the newspapers in an age when almost everybody read one and many bought both morning and evening papers.

The post 18 January 1964 on ABC Weekend TV appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

★

We start the day with an hour of adult education. There were no advertisements in or between these programmes, making the viewing experience something like watching BBCtv. So why did Independent Television bother? The answer is twofold. First, it was very good politically: when MPs and the great and the good stood up to decry television in general and ITV in particular, as they did with wearisome regularity, it was very helpful to point to these educational and highbrow offerings as a way of deflecting criticism of Crossroads and Double Your Money. The second reason was to do with advertisement placement on the network.

The number of minutes each hour and each day allowed for advertising was severely limited by the Postmaster General. An hour of programmes that didn’t count towards the maximum hourage of television permitted each day but did count towards the average number of hours for calculating permitted advertisement time allowed the ITV companies to sell a couple of minutes more during peak time, which more than paid for the programmes themselves.

Another reason was to do with the post-war settlement. The people behind television had been through the Second World War and had joined the rest of the country in deciding that the nation needed drastic change once the conflict was over. This came through universal free healthcare, social security, decent affordable housing, and a new view of education as something that was a right for children and a responsibility for government. The school leaving age was progressively raised, technical colleges created to ensure that future manual workers could get qualifications and a university education became something obtained through hard work and intelligence rather than access to lots of money and who your father knew.

But what about those who had already left school? And those that had slipped through the cracks in the system? The television executives thought they could do their bit by providing programmes for anybody who wanted to learn more, even as they sat at home with 45 hours of work bearing down on them from tomorrow. And they were right: millions watched, thousands learnt and hundreds went on to do night classes or even go back to education. ITV may have benefited from the reputation boost and the income from these programmes, but it’s important to remember the genuine altruism of the executives in a time of a more communal nation state.

Transport (9.55am) From the timing of this programme, you would be forgiven for thinking that it’s going to be based on the Beeching Report of 9 months earlier. While that was undoubtedly fresh in people’s minds – especially if they were about to lose their local rail service – the programme is actually more subtle than that.

What it is actually about is teaching reasoning and explaining that political and personal decisions often require a balance to be made between two competing but mutually exclusive goals – in this case, high quality services vs low fares. Both are laudable goals. But we can’t have them together. Which should we chose? Is there a balance between these two societal goods? What appears to be a programme about rail and bus journeys is, therefore, actually a complex lesson in sociology and a window into the world of high-level decision making.

Citizenship (10.15am) The 1944 Education Act, implemented by the incoming post-war Labour Government, extended free secondary education to the masses, most of whom had previously left formal education at 14. But the method it used was becoming controversial. Each child did a series of tests at age 11, which divided them into three: the ‘gold’ children, the brain boxes, who could deal with intangibles and would go on to grammar school and thus into management positions; the ‘silver’ children, who needed solid notions, who could be taught what they needed to know for their skilled and semi-skilled apprenticeships, plus enough maths to do the shopping and enough English to write a letter in secondary schools; and the ‘iron’ children, who you couldn’t educate in such a way, who would learn to do things with their hands in the technical schools, ready for their manual jobs.

It was thought that a third of all children would go into one of the three streams, and a third of the budget would follow them. In practice, 25% of children went to grammar schools and 75% went to secondary schools – the technical schools were usually simply not built. Worse, 75% of the money went to the grammar schools and 25% to the secondaries.

The result was seen to be that most middle class children got the grammar school education they’d always got, but now for free, whilst most working class children were taught the basics en masse and thrown into the job market. The upper class children continued as they had before, in private schools. This did nothing at all for Britain’s rigid class structure: at 11 years old, children were told whether they were upper, middle or working class and that was that – there was to be no movement between the three tiers.

By 1964, there was a groundswell against this system, especially (but not exclusively) in the opposition Labour Party. They had swept the municipal elections the previous year and were now pursuing a policy of ‘comprehensivisation’ in Bristol, Manchester, Liverpool and London – creating mixed schools where all pupils would go at 11, allowing for pupils to move between streams, mix with different classes, and, most importantly, benefit from 100% of the total budget.

So why this programme? It’s not really to explain all that we’ve just said, although it did do that. Like Transport before it, it was again teaching reasoning and sociology, and again showing that decision making, especially at a high level, was about balancing competing priority and social goods: in this case, teaching children according to their needs vs teaching children according to the nation’s future needs. It also served to explain how children were being educated to their parents – this period is before Parent/Teacher Nights and report cards being sent home, an age when parents sent their children to school to be educated and simply expected that to happen without much in the way of the real-time measurement and micromanagement that is now the norm.

Mesdames, Messieurs (10.40am) The programmes companies often specialised in certain types of programmes. In schools television, Rediffusion did a lot of French teaching programmes; in adult education, ATV did the same. Most interesting was Tyne Tees, which specialised in Russian. A nice touch from the TVTimes is putting the credits of Mesdames, Messieurs in French.

Closedown (12.15pm)  Everything stops for Sunday lunch, which includes television and even the transmitters: the plugs at Winter Hill and Emley Moor being pulled and the staff going off for dinner. Meanwhile at ABC in Parrs Wood Road, Didsbury, the staff would stream out across the road to the Parrs Wood pub for a carvery and a swift half.

Headway (1.10pm)  We’re back on air for more adult education. This one is disguised as a “how to write better letters” programme, but was actually more subtle than that: it was about how to write letters, full stop. Much of the pre-Butler Act population had left school at 14, as mentioned above, and, whilst not illiterate, they were awkward with writing long pieces and had poor penmanship skills.

This programme therefore taught them how to write cursive, where to put the name and address, how to start and finish – the basics that we, educated to 16 and beyond, would now take for granted. The title ‘Headway’ originally applied to all of ABC’s adult education output, and was a series of series on different subjects, including basic cooking skills with Philip Harben.

The strand had outgrown the ‘Headway’ branding and expanded in the year since networked adult education programmes began on ITV, but the name was in the titles of the original series so was kept on as they were regularly repeated – this one being almost exactly a year old having launched the Sunday Session slot.

ABC Farming Comment (1.30pm)  We think of ABC as serving the industrialised north of England and the factory lands of the west Midlands. But their VHF transmissions went much further, with Winter Hill penetrating into the north of Wales, Emley Moor covering Lincolnshire and Lichfield reaching into Herefordshire and Worcestershire.

These areas had less population than the cities ABC also covered, but were economically important. A programme of interest to farmers sold advertising either side heavily – Monsanto, the maker of DDT, was a big customer for these slots – making it a very worthwhile programme for ABC. Despite only being 10 minutes, including the advert breaks either side, it was packed with features made by the ABC Outside Broadcasting unit during the preceding week, as well as having Stuart Seaton, founding editor of the Farmers Guardian, commenting on the latest agricultural news.

Rugby League (1.40pm)  General entertainment programming on Sundays had been restricted by the Postmaster General to not starting until 3pm. This had just been loosened to “not starting until after 2.30pm”.

This ‘after’ had bothered the ITV companies, but rather than seeking clarification, they went for 2.35pm as the start of entertainment programming. That leaves ABC with just short of an hour to fill with something that must be clearly for a minority audience.

Here they fill it with Rugby League football, the northern version of the game for men with odd-shaped balls. Thus ABC wins by showing something that’s both popular in their area but a minority pursuit in the UK as a whole, neatly sidestepping the rules.

Candid Camera (3.35pm) The Independent Television Authority loathed Candid Camera from the beginning in 1960. The first two editions were presented by Bob Monkhouse who then fled, not returning for the full run starting in 1961.

It was perceived as nasty, even cruel, with the public as victims who were being laughed at, not with. The ITA hated this, and looked for reasons to ban it. There were none, besides the Authority requiring that it saw written permission from everyone who appeared in shot to prove they were happy to be seen. But by and large they were, so that didn’t work.

Nevertheless, ABC and the TVTimes work hard here to soften the programme in the description. The public aren’t victims, they’re the stars. David Nixon, always avuncular, gives the show a soft, happy narration, encouraging us to laugh with the victims, err, stars, rather than at them.

When the format was reborn in the 1980s under the eye of Jeremy Beadle at LWT, this was taken a stage further: the victim of the prank was brought into the studio, professionally made-up, given quality clothing and treated like a true star. They appeared in their finery in a box in the corner of the screen as the prank played out, laughing at themselves and the whole scene.

It made for slightly less excruciating viewing. But only slightly.

The Littlest Hobo (5.35pm) This series was based on a 1958 US film, and ran for two seasons of 61 episodes in total. It was made in Canada in colour, being broadcast in Canada and the US in 1963, so this is a pretty recent import for ABC. The programme was revived in 1979, running for 114 episodes over six seasons.

The Sunday Break (6.15pm) Barry Westwood makes his second appearance of the day on ABC. The idea for this programme was conceived of as a way of filling the previously off-air 6.15pm to 7pm period, presented to MPs and churchmen as speaking to people who weren’t going to church anyway, people who took the 45-minute closedown as an opportunity to put on Radio Luxembourg or their collection of 45s.

People who went to church would still go to church, ABC’s argument ran, so here’s a way of reaching those that didn’t, in a format that would speak to younger people in particular. This argument worked, the closedown was abolished, and The Sunday Break appeared and immediately began to undermine the purpose it was created for.

The description says it all: this isn’t religion, despite the presence of Penry Jones as the Religious Adviser, and despite there usually being a (generally young and hip) vicar present on screen. This programme is, yet again, about sociology, this time disguised as moral questions. 1964 really was a time when everybody was a budding sociologist, with big plans for the future of the nation and the world – this fed directly into the White Heat of Technology ethos that would bring Harold Wilson’s Labour party back into power after 13 years in October.

Val Parnell’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium (8.25pm) Here we are in the last few months of The Beatles still being a British phenomena, with Beatlemania in the US coming shortly but not yet sparked off. Therefore, they’re still available to appear on the Palladium show in a way they wouldn’t be in a year’s time; just a year before, they were still to be found on Granada’s local news magazine Scene at 6.30.

Meanwhile, Alma Cogan was going in the other direction: a year before she had been too big for the Palladium; a year later she’d be lucky to get on About Anglia. Although she didn’t know it – her family decided not to tell her – she was already dying of stomach cancer. It would kill her in October 1966.

ABC Armchair Theatre (9.35pm) Women had been a power in the workforce during the recent war, but when the men came home from the front, Jill was supposed to get back in her box.

And for much of the 1950s, she did. But things were changing. Single women were now an important part of working life, if only because there was a drastic labour shortage. But married women? No, they were expected to leave their jobs after the wedding and get on with being housewives.

The world in 1964 is moving on: divorce has got easier, but what about divorced women? The ex-husband was often, but by no means always, told by the court to contribute to any child’s financial wellbeing. Divorced women, however, were expected to support themselves… but how? Employers were used to women leaving upon marriage and thus had no experience of hiring people with childcare obligations, since men never had any.

Armchair Theatre had been revolutionary since it began, showing the millions of ITV viewers such issues as ‘the colour bar’, addiction, literacy, even hinting at the ‘problem’ of homosexuality. Here Donald Churchill takes this new issue in hand: what do we do about a divorced woman with childcare responsibilities who needs money and wants to work? As an aside: why, 56 years later, is this still an issue?

Faces of Power (11.10pm) Here’s a programme with three uses. First, it’s an export sale for ATV, clearly aimed at being sold to NET, the American public broadcasting network.

Secondly, it counts for the ITA as a ‘serious’ contribution by ATV, always useful for a company permanently accused of being too lightweight and entertainment-driven.

Thirdly, it’s useful for ABC, who have had 7 hours and 25 minutes on air today with programming that counts towards their 15 hour maximum for the entire weekend. With the adult education in the morning, the OB from Headingley in the afternoon and all the religion excluded, the hours of entertainment have rapidly added up. But who wants to go off air at about 11.15pm if they can help it? Certainly not ABC. A half hour of further adult education takes them much nearer to a more useful closedown time.

Epilogue (untimed) We’ve pointed this out before elsewhere, but the epilogue ran 7 nights a week in the Midlands, across both ATV and ABC. In the North, Granada had no interest in any religious programming unless they scored a Christmas Day on a weekday, and even then the reluctance was palpable.

Therefore tonight’s epilogue is one of only two seen in the North in an average week. When they came from Aston, the vicar presenting would sometimes slip up and tell viewers what he’d be talking about tomorrow, despite not appearing on Granada.

Tonight, he’s in the North, most likely in ABC’s tiny remotely operated single camera studio on the top floor of the ABC Forum cinema on Lime Street in Liverpool. He’ll need to pull a cord to switch off the lights and camera when he leaves.

The post 12 January 1964 on ABC Weekend TV appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

Saturday’s sports service on ITV had tried several formats. The main issue was a difference of opinion between ATV London and ABC in the Midlands and North as to what Saturday daytimes were for. ATV wanted to reach a family audience. ABC wanted to compete with the BBC’s Grandstand for the eyes and ears of the male audience. ATV believed that the most money was to be made from the largest audience. ABC thought that Grandstand would steamroller any light entertainment on ITV in this slot; and, anyway, advertisers needed a different proposition on Saturdays because the shops were closed on Sundays. Reaching the pockets of the kids and the brand awareness of the housewives just as they wouldn’t be able to buy anything was pointless.

The regions at first went their own way, but by the 1960s had hit upon Let’s Go, which mixed sports reports with light entertainment from the ATV-ABC joint Aston Studios in Birmingham. But the mixture – going from football to a cartoon to swimming to a fashion parade – really didn’t work.

In lieu of a better idea comes Saturday Sportstime. This is an overarching title for separate programmes, throwing back to the regions for their own continuity if they chose and allowing for companies to opt in and out of individual elements.

This also didn’t work very well, so in 1965 ABC came up with a proper rival for Grandstand, World of Sport, and poached, to huge headlines across the newspapers, the BBC Light Programme sports presenter Eamonn Andrews to be the face of the new programme.

There’s a full hour and 20 minutes of professional wrestling from Walthamstow at 3.45pm. This is one programme that did reach a family audience. Professional wrestling, with its heroes and baddies and general theatricals, was popular with everybody – especially older women, a hard group for advertisers to reach outside of the extremely expensive centre break in Coronation Street. It’s noted here as an ATV presentation, as it’s ABC cameras in East London but ATV money paying for the programme. Lew Grade and the other impresarios at ATV didn’t really understand sport – light entertainment was predictable, controllable and logical and left viewers happy; sport appeared to be a selection of random events with random outcomes that either left viewers ecstatic or depressed, with nothing in the middle. Professional wrestling, though, had all the hallmarks of light entertainment, with a predetermined outcome after set battles between goodies and baddies. That was easy to understand, and ATV was happy to get its chequebook out. The commentator, as always, is Kent Walton, to this day remembered as the voice of British wresting.

Light entertainment starts at 5.15pm with The Adventures of Robin Hood. This series was made by Sapphire Films in the UK with ATV money in the run up to the launch of ITV in 1955. It took advantage of the Red Scare going on in the United States by hiring blacklisted television and film producers, directors and writers who were unable to find work at home as they were considered to be Communists, Communist sympathisers, friends with other Communists or simply would not implicate friends for being alleged Communists. This meant that the quality of series was high – these people were very talented – but also required the use of pseudonyms and separate prints removing real names for episodes that were shown on CBS.

Southern appears to have looped round on the 143-episode series, as we’re at episode 5 of the first season, fully introducing the character of Maid Marian (she’d been a background character for the past two episodes) and completing the ‘Merry Men’ ensemble – one of whom having been introduced in each of the preceding episodes.

Television pop favourite Thank Your Lucky Stars is on at 5.50pm, in its summer clip-show guise as Lucky Stars: Summer Spin. There’s no live audience; Mark Wynter sits alone in an armchair and introduces telerecordings from the winter/spring series of the ABC show. Dropped in the middle is The Pop Shop, allowing Janice “O’il Goive it Foive” Nicholls to talk about this week’s new releases, with Rediffusion’s Muriel Young for some reason, keeping the programme topical even while it throws back to repeat performances before and after.

Opportunity Knocks! at 7.25pm is both old and new. Hughie Green first took the format to the BBC Light Programme in 1949, then to Radio Luxembourg in 1950. Upon the start of ITV, he made a series of it for Associated-Rediffusion, but it wasn’t a good fit with them. In July 1964 he took the format to ABC in Didsbury, and this time it proved a big hit. This show is number 10 of the 26-episode run this year, which is why the TVTimes is still explaining the format in the listing. OpNox! would run for 107 editions on ABC, followed by a further 341 on Thames, only coming to an end in 1978. Few episodes survive – even the 1977/8 series of 27 shows has left a mere 4 in the archives.

Tonight’s film premiere is the 1955 B-picture Secret Venture. This was made at Nettlefold Studios by the American company Republic Pictures and is quite the potboiler, with two femmes fatale, swapped briefcases, codes, spies, a segment set in Paris but filmed in Walton-on-Thames, eastern European bad guys and jet travel, plus an American star to make sure it sold on both sides of the Atlantic.

Sitcom time at 9.35pm with ATV London’s Fire Crackers. This series is set amongst a group of bungling village firefighters and the exasperated regulars in the town brigade, but with the unusual twist of having the village firefighters fighting crime as well as fires. If this formula sounds a bit familiar, it should – swap the firefighters for the Home Guard and the town brigade for the ARP and you’ve got Dad’s Army. For a 1964 comedy shot on video, it’s amazing to discover that all 13 episodes survive in the archives to this day.

10.05pm takes us to Victorian London with ATV’s Sergeant Cork. This long-running series made a star of John Barrie, who had previously been a relatively minor player in films. There are a number of names in this episode who would go on to bigger things later. Peter Sallis was already well known and would continue to be a star throughout his very long life. William Gaunt was pretty well an newcomer but would rise up via ITC’s The Champions. This episode pulls out all the stops for Victorian London cliches, especially by throwing in opium dens. Alas, as was typical of the time, the main Chinese male characters are white blokes – Sallis and perennial bit-part actor Christopher Guinee – in yellowface.

The 11.05pm slot on ITV on Saturdays was often used for a local programme, set against the otherwise ABC- and ATV-dominated network schedule before it. ABC used it for ABC at Large, its investigative journalism programme. ATV London today are showing Galton and Simpson’s short-lived Spike Milligan vehicle Milligan’s Wake, which Southern knocks to 11.35pm. Instead, Southern uses the slot for a clip-show of the week’s Day By Day stories with Second Look, which seems to interrupt the flow of otherwise non-stop entertainment this Saturday night and might have been a bit jarring a contrast for viewers. The presenter is Ian Ross, later to be BBC News’s industrial correspondent during that notoriously quiet and uneventful period of industrial relations, the 1970s.

Speaking of Milligan’s Wake, this series is almost entirely forgotten: Wikipedia doesn’t even mention it in Spike’s otherwise extensive filmography, and even the Internet Movie Database lacks a description and any other details beyond Spike playing ‘various roles’. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t survive in the archives – if it did, it would, like almost all Milligan’s work, be revered – but an LP of sketches from the show was released by Pye in 1964 and is worth keeping an eye out for on the rare occasions a copy appears on eBay.

The post Saturday 12 September 1964 on Southern appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

Different ITV companies specialised in different sports. If there’s swimming on ITV, it’s a solid bet that it’s TWW cameras. If there’s horse racing, the OB equipment comes from Rediffusion. And if it’s show jumping, then it’s a Southern production. Southern had a long – and mutually fruitful – relationship with the All England Jumping Course at Hickstead in Sussex and would produce programmes for the network, as here, or just for their own viewers. Either way, Raymond Brooks-Ward (1930-1992), who pioneered the idea of commentating on show jumping, was always there, on his own or with Dorian Williams. He moved to Grandstand on BBC-1 in 1982, as Southern’s successor TVS had little interest in the sport.

Small Time at 4.45pm makes use of Rediffusion’s continuity announcing team. Howard Williams, like most announcers, was an actor, with continuity being what he did when he was ‘resting’. This was a useful side job for actors who were voice trained and used to having to improvise and was more regular work than the after dinner speaking circuit. Ivan Owen, Williams’s co-performer, was also the voice of Fred Barker in the Five O’Clock Club, and provided the voice for Basil Brush opposite Rodney Bewes in the 1968 Friday evening BBC-1 series.

Day By Day is one of the longest of the daily magazine shows on ITV. This week, Monday’s edition runs to 40 minutes, Tuesday is 25 minutes, Wednesday 35 minutes, Thursday 35 minutes and today 35 minutes. Most other magazine shows at this time hover around 15 minutes, reaching 25 minutes for editions with a sports report on the end. For Southern, this creates an odd 20 minute gap between the end of Day By Day and the start of network prime time programmes at 7pm. Each day they fill it with a short local production. Today it’s the famous Out of Town with Jack Hargreaves (1911-1994). Hargreaves was the face of the station, Mr Southern, synonymous with their output. He had originally been hired by the company to be an executive, commissioning Southern productions as Assistant Programme Controller. But he was so popular in front of the camera in his first programme – Gone Fishing – that he came up against the Independent Television Authority’s rule that an individual can be an executive at a company or a star on that company… but never both. He chose to stay on screen, and continued to act as a programme controller unofficially.

The Celebrity Game at 7pm is what would evolve into NBC’s Hollywood Squares in 1965, and ATV’s Celebrity Squares in 1975. Viewers send in yes-or-no questions for the celebrities to answer, and contestants must guess – and give reasons for – what each celebrity will say. Each correct answer gains them £10 (up to the ITA’s maximum of £1,000), whilst three wrong answers in a row sends them home. Viewers sending in questions get a £1 Premium Bond if their question is used. As ever, Rediffusion is able to use its might as the backbone of ITV to pull in at least one huge star for each edition. The first show had Groucho Marx; tonight sees movie star Kenneth More answering questions.

8.25pm sees Stars and Starters. This is an frankly insane hybrid between the nightclub variety show Stars and Garters and Independent Television’s horse racing coverage team, who are here to commentate on greyhound racing from West Ham. It’s all for charity, unsurprisingly – the Variety Club of Great Britain.

ITV had no choice in the placement of Party Political Broadcasts. They could either show them when the BBC showed them, or not show them at all. And the ITA was clear: not showing them at all was really not an option. This creates problems for ITV schedulers – the BBC happily runs everything 15 minutes later than usual, but ITV like to get back on track to allow certainty for advertisers. Tonight’s placement of the Labour Party’s broadcast puts them in a really awkward position. The space between the news and the broadcast has to be filled with something, but is only 20 minutes, so Rediffusion invent a quick jazz programme. But the 12 minutes between the broadcast ending and a decent 10pm starting time is impossible to fill, so programmes until about 11.30pm have to run with a weird 8 minute offset to make up for it. However, this is only admitted to in the London TVTimes. In the Southern edition, the programme times are rounded off, so viewers are told to expect It’s a Woman’s World at 9.45pm when it actually airs at 9.48pm; Southern viewers are told to tune into Call in on Carroll at 10.40pm, but will actually have to wait 8 more minutes, until 10.48pm, for the show to actually start. And the news headlines, advertised as being at 11.10 are actually at 11.18pm. All in all, very unsatisfactory for the ITV network, the viewers and the advertisers. One wonders if the BBC did it deliberately.

Labour’s party political broadcast itself was a powerful one. The opinion polls said there was a definite swing to Labour to be seen, but it ranged from 2.75%, which gave the Conservatives a majority of 30, to 4%, giving Labour a majority of 23. An election had to happen by mid-October, so clearly there was all to play for. Labour chose the name “A New Britain” for both this broadcast and its manifesto. Both looked forward to the 1970s, and how Britain could use ‘the white heat of technology’ and Labour’s ‘new thinking’ to turn the country from the backward-looking, ageing, ‘dirty’ country it had become after 13 years of Tory rule into a forward-looking, young and bright nation ready to take on the challenges of automation, housing and education.

It was a powerful message, although it didn’t sit very well with a lot of middle Britain, who were perfectly happy for the country to plod on as it had been, since those 13 years had been ones of growth, low inflation and calm after the changes of World War II and the Attlee revolution. To try to reach those people, Labour contrasted the recently appointed Prime Minister, Alexander Frederick Douglas-Home, former 14th Earl of Home, former Lord Dunglass, Scottish landowner, Eton Old Boy, and Chamberlain’s right-hand-man during the years of appeasement before the war with the younger, hipper, working class Grammar school boy Harold Wilson. They were helped by the fact that the high contrast and ‘silver glow’ of black and white 405-line television made Home look like a very very old man – in repose, his bald head looked like a skull. In contrast, Wilson looked young and determined and was happy to try to compare himself with the late John F Kennedy.

In the end, this contrast between backward and forward, between old and young, between chugging industry and robotic automation, would swing the election for Labour – just, with a majority of 4.

Tonight’s big play, at 9.45pm (well, 9.48pm, but we’ve covered this) is by Margaret Drabble and is another of those programmes only Granada could make. 1964 is before ‘feminism’ is really a thing. There are ‘women’s libbers’ around, but they’re not much to be seen on television – they’re not even the butt of male comedian’s jokes, the peak of that would be a decade later. But subtle feminist thought is there, and finds expression in Granada’s play series It’s a Woman’s World. This play, ‘Laura’, is one of the first to address post-natal depression, then not accepted by most (male) doctors as an actual thing. It also, and this is a retrospective call, covers the absence of paternity leave rights for men: once Patricia England’s character has had her baby, her husband goes back to work, leaving her alone with a screaming child in a home in the middle of nowhere, her only contact with adult humans being with travelling salesmen – which is no better than not having any human contact at all. As always, Drabble puts suitable twist on all of this, so the main message may not have been seen by male viewers. But the play spoke directly to female viewers as she intended it to.

11.12pm is ITN’s foreign news programme. News from outside the UK was not popular with viewers; news from outside the Commonwealth and the United States was seen as audience poison. ITN’s main bulletins therefore concentrated on what was happening in the UK in particular, with trips abroad limited to later in the bulletin and firmly from English-speaking countries. But it was not possible to completely ignore world news, so ITN places it in Roving Report – perhaps something of a ghetto, but good to see anyway. This was one of the programmes that would be folded into the new News at Ten in 1967, the new programme daringly often leading with international stories and not shy of giving the back quarter hour over to one whole story filmed on location somewhere where English was not spoken.

The post Friday 11 September 1964 on Southern appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

Children’s television at 5pm sees Granada’s Junior Criss Cross Quiz, which was more popular than the adult version which Southern declined to network yesterday. This kids version is presented by Robert Holness – better known later as Bob Holness, presenter of Central’s Blockbusters.

More early-evening pop at 6.40pm, this time with For Teenagers Only from ATV. This, like all off-peak ITV pop shows it seems, features second rank pop stars, this time in the Aston Studios in Birmingham. The show has no presenter as such, with the linking being done by Denny Seyton and the Sabres, who would later this month reach 48 in the charts with a cover of Fred Astaire’s 1936 hit The Way You look Tonight.

Rediffusion’s Don’t Say a Word at 7pm is a sort of Give Us a Clue with words, or the US quiz show Password with actions. Each team takes turns to pantomime a word, phrase or title without saying any of the words from it, whilst their fellow team members try to guess. To make it more fiendish, the phases were impenetrable nonsense – one was “they crossed a mouse with an elephant and got a huge rat that never forgot”, which was still guessed correctly by the boys’ team.

HMS Paradise at 7.30pm is fascinating. It’s much of the cast of the BBC Light Programme’s comedy The Navy Lark, playing the same characters with slightly different names, in the same setting but with the ship renamed from HMS Troutbridge, and written by one of The Navy Lark‘s writers. One can only assume that the BBC held copyright on everything from The Navy Lark except the format itself. Most odd.

8pm sees The Hidden Truth, a series with similarities to the later BBC show Silent Witness. It’s about about the new science of forensics, a subject that was just getting into the national psyche at the time. Being from before the development of DNA testing, they don’t have the wondrous ability displayed in various CSI-style series to track down a whole family of murderers from one smudged lipstick print on a discarded cigarette, so the show fills in the gaps with old fashion detective work from the medical team and a lot of soap opera-style emotional baggage. Note the young Ian Ogilvy in the cast: his fame lay before him – this is only his fourth appearance before the cameras – with his career taking off after a big role in Granada’s 1966 strange series The Liars.

ITV’s flagship news analysis programme This Week is at 9.10pm. This show, which would be kept on by Thames and run until their demise in 1992 (under the name TV Eye between 1980 and 1985), was a big hit in the ratings, unusual for such a serious programme. The reporters listed show the quality of the series: Bryan Magee is a philosopher, Desmond Wilcox a documentary maker and presenter of ABC at Large, Paul Johnson a firebrand left-wing contributor to the New Statesman (and later its editor), Russell Spurr a military historian, George Ffitch a journalist and lobby correspondent, and James Cameron a famed foreign correspondent. Under the management of Jeremy Issacs, one of Britain’s finest ever producers and television executives, This Week was showered with awards and remaining editions in the archives are still watchable and interesting years after the topical events they covered have faded from memory.

Anthology series – an overarching title for a series of programmes, with The Twilight Zone or without Armchair Theatre an overarching theme – were popular in the 1960s. NBC’s The Richard Boone Show at 9.40pm is an unusual example of this: it has no overarching theme, but the cast is largely the same from episode to episode, a sort of TV version of a repertory company, with each actor playing different roles of different importance from week to week. It didn’t prosper in the States, where it ran against CBS’s Petticoat Junction, which flattened it in the ratings. It was cancelled in March 1964 after 25 episodes.

What the Papers Say (which had 4 incarnations over more than 50 years – ITV, Channel 4, BBC-2 and Radio 4) was a show made by journalists for journalists, the newspaper-themed equivalent of Farming Today for farmers. As such, it has a chequered history of networking across ITV: appealing mainly to journalists, it did great numbers in London, Manchester and Glasgow, the three journalistic hubs of the time. Elsewhere, with only local papers rather than national titles being produced, it didn’t gain much traction, so it pops up for periods on ATV Midlands and Southern, as here, and the like, before disappearing again just as quickly.

The series is really the forerunner to the BBC’s That Was The Week That Was and its related Ned Sherrin productions, and of Private Eye, whose writers and editors became frequent hosts, in that it was very happy to speak truth to power and also to mercilessly take the mickey of the powerful at the same time. The great and good didn’t complain because they couldn’t – you don’t fall out with almost every national journalist if you can help it – and also because the programme was happy to point out the flaws, mistakes and egos within the newspapers themselves. The practice of reading out headlines and excerpts of articles in voices attuned to the aimed-for readership of each paper was a hit with the journalists – most of them then as now middle class and liberal despite the tone of their respective newspapers.

As ever with a programme that speaks directly to a small (if vocal) audience with such humour and sticks two fingers up at its own viewers – and indeed everybody else – this could only be a Granada production. It’s hard to imagine any other ITV company having the chutzpah.

Yesterday, we wondered if an arts review programme really counted as adult education. There are no such qualms with tonight’s Towards 2000 from Rediffusion at 11.05pm. Today the programme looks at computers (in the Southern edition of the TVTimes) or computors (in the London edition), suggesting that even the word is new and unusual. The listing is illustrated with a picture of a “compact” computer that merely fills one whole room and is mostly mechanical. Unlike the breathless tone of Tuesday’s Futurama or the forthcoming BBC Tomorrow’s World, this programme isn’t excited by the coming of the computer age. Instead John Maddox, a theoretical physicist and later editor of Nature, takes a skeptical view as to whether computers and automation will find a place in future society, and if they do, how will they change that very society they have infiltrated? This, of course, is from the point of view of how computers may make teams of clerks and typists redundant, rather than whether the internet will bring back the Nazis and illegally swing a referendum; but it reflects the similar occasional panics that grip modern media as to whether robots will replace workers any time soon.

This programme was taken by all of ITV, but not every region took it at 11.05pm. Granada, for instance, moved it to noon, showing it directly after schools programmes, possibly to catch the technical colleges that were a feature of the north at the time.

The post Thursday 10 September 1964 on Southern appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

Wednesday 9 September opens with the same programmes as yesterday, diverting at 5pm to Granada’s Zoo Time. This programme featured Desmond Morris at one of the UK’s main zoos – London, Whipsnade and Chester. These were the days when zoos were mainly museums for showing live animals. The animals themselves were in small cages and a day out to the zoo simply involved going to see unhappy creatures in too small a confined space watching the visitors mournfully. This would change as time passed, partially because of programmes like Zoo Time being compared by viewers to Anglia’s Survival series, which showed animals in their natural habitats. As people started to find the idea of zoos-as-museums bothersome, the cages were broken out into enclosures, with much more natural environments and more space, and the zoos themselves started to specialised in endangered species and breeding in captivity, rehabilitating their image.

Desmond Morris is a zoologist who turned his scientific eye on human beings, studying our behaviour in the same way he studied animal behaviour, and used Zoo Time to specifically draw comparisons and note similarities between non-human and human animals, particularly spotting the large overlap in sociobiological behaviour between humans and other primates. The series also brought on a different expert in each episode to talk about some aspect of zoo life or biology; this week Morris talks to the head of London Zoo’s young zoologist club and brings on a child, Richard Claypole, from Mill Hill in London who has his own menagerie at home with 120 animals.

Fred Dinenage is back at 5.25 for Three Go Round, yet another hipper take on Blue Peter. The TVTimes calls this a Southern Network Production, differing from the usual plain Southern Production, yet this is not networked: Rediffusion fills the slot with Yogi Bear & Friends, an edited together string of older cartoons from Yogi, Snagglepuss and Yakky Doodle Duck. This is therefore possibly another major-minor programme swap, liable to go out on Anglia, TWW and STV as well.

Rediffusion extends the Ready Steady Go! brand into Ready Steady – Win! at 6.40 on Southern. This was a time shift for Southern, as it had shown on Monday on Rediffusion. This change displaces Granada’s otherwise networked Criss Cross Quiz, which doesn’t get a Southern time shift and is just dropped, although Southern do carry the Junior version later in the week.

There’s a general election due this year – the last one having been held in 1959 – and although it hasn’t been called yet, the parties know this and are making full use of their allotted Party Political Broadcasts. At this time these are still 15 minutes long, and have a television monopoly: they’re on BBC-1, BBC-2 and all ITV companies at the same time. The BBC’s policy is to run programmes 15 minutes late for the rest of the evening, but ITV tried to bring everything back to time, and the 9.10pm The Girls in My Life, at a mere 20 minutes, seems designed purely to fill an awkward spot. Eden Kane is also known as Richard Sarstedt, older brother to Peter and Robin. You may not know him, but if you’ve ever watched the 1990s Star Trek series, you’ll have seen him: he turns up in the background all the time through TNG, DS9, Voyager and Enterprise playing various miscellaneous non-speaking crew members.

At 9.45pm it’s 45 minutes of high culture as Granada from the North goes to… London’s West End to take in a popular revue. It’s difficult to imagine even BBC Four today doing three quarters of an hour of two people stood by a piano singing, even if they’re singing popular standards such as Mack the Knife and It Was Never You. This is certainly material to please the Independent Television Authority, although how well it did up against East Side/West Side, a CBS drama series, over on BBC-1, and part 15 of Correlli Barnett’s history series The Great War on BBC-2 is a matter of conjecture.

Notwithstanding the 15 minute Party Political Broadcast, the hourage for the week on Southern is overrunning. Therefore, some programme has to be being designated as adult education to prevent a closedown at the extraordinary early time of 11.15pm. The only contender is For Art’s Sake at 11.12pm, which gives us a 15 minute review of the arts scene in the Southern region. As ever, the definition of adult education is being stretched a bit here. Nevertheless we’re off air by 11.30pm. Rediffusion in London came on 15 minutes later than Southern and extends the day to midnight by slipping in half an hour of an ATV programme that is also pretending to be adult education – the cherishably named Edgar Lustgarten meeting people who are feeling frustrated with bureaucracy.

The post Wednesday 9 September 1964 on Southern appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

Tuesday 8 September 1964 begins as the rest of the week will, with the horse racing from Doncaster. The TVTimes accurately bills it as a Granada TV Network Presentation rather than Production, as it’s actually Rediffusion’s OB racing team in disguise. The same OB production team were together for over 20 years, through Associated-Rediffusion, Rediffusion London and Thames, making this one of the most consistent sports formats ITV ever came up with.

The racing finishes at 4.15pm, leaving a short gap before afternoon and evening programmes can reasonably be on. Southern’s gap is 15 minutes; by comparison, Rediffusion in London is off for 30 minutes. The General Post Office’s rules on these things were that gaps under 20 minutes were mere intervals, so a slide or clock and some gramophone music could be played out, which is what Southern would have done. Gaps of over 20 minutes require the ITV contractor to hand the transmitter back to the Independent Television Authority, for it to go off or to radiate a test card or a trade test. This requires a quick formal closedown and then a full 5-minute opening sequence with authority announcement at the end, which is what Rediffusion will have done.

BBC-2’s Joan Bakewell and ITN’s Ivor Mills present Southern’s Home at Four-Thirty. This is 15 minutes long, leading one to wonder what can possibly be squeezed into such a short time. Whether it’s budget or the tight rules on broadcasting hours that keeps this programme to a mere 45 minutes a week is a good question.

Children’s television begins at 4.45pm and does what these slots have always done: start with the very youngest and make their way up to the older children. The first programme, Small Time, is the Rediffusion version of the BBC’s Watch With Mother, an overall title for a parade of different formats, albeit linked each day by Pussycat Willum and his human handler – Rediffusion announcers Muriel Young or Howard Williams. The programmes run across the week with the pattern of a story on Mondays, puppets on Tuesdays, music on Wednesdays, a picture book on Thursdays and an adventure serial on Fridays. The ITA Yearbooks call this slot ‘part networked’, but the list of regions not showing it – ATV Midlands, Granada, both TWW services, STV and Grampian – comes to comfortably over 50% of the population.

Howard Williams will be presenting Small Time today, as Muriel Young is otherwise engaged in the fully networked twice weekly Five O’Clock Club, Rediffusion’s answer to Blue Peter. The difference between Blue Peter and the Five O’Clock Club was that the Club managed to be simultaneously hipper than Blue Peter and yet also more childish. The Club happily brought on (slightly second rank) pop singers to fill their 25 minutes, providing the hip quota, but also had a parade of puppet presenters. These latter creatures just avoided poisoning too many of the more grown up viewers by having a line in cheeky jokes and comments and bantering with the sometimes exasperated human presenters.

5.25pm sees the now-google-proof Futurama. This programme, whilst aimed at older children rather than adults, would be what the BBC would rip off next year to create Tomorrow’s World: a mixture of gadgets, scientific developments and general popular science. Futurama was presented by Jimmy Hanley, who had started off as a Rank juvenile before the war, then crossed over into grown up roles afterwards, but never becoming a real film star. What made his name was presenting Associated-Rediffusion’s advertising magazine cum soap opera cum comedy drama Jim’s Inn, where he was the eponymous landlord. His avuncular style and obvious good nature resonated well with viewers and made him an idea adult to guide younger watchers around the scientific world they would find when they reached adulthood. He even had a kids column in the TVTimes – Tivvi Club – for many years.

The 6.30pm slot is fascinating. It’s used by ITV to get a slice of the family viewing audience who are mostly to be found watching on weekends. This valuable audience was hard for the weekday companies to catch, so much so that Granada didn’t even bother, filling the slot with its highly regarded local news magazine Scene. Rediffusion put a first run episode of animated comedy The Flintstones in this space – ticking all the boxes for family viewing – whilst Southern has their own production, Discwizz.

Discwizz, which was evidently not live because the train service from Waterloo to Southampton can’t get Muriel Young there after her Five O’Clock Club live stint, lines up two teams of 15-25 year olds, split into male and female, each with a team captain from the record industry. Muriel Young and Tony Hall were both known to viewers from their Radio Luxembourg pop programmes (Hall had just helped launch Radio Caroline as well) and the director, Mike Mansfield, was himself a composer and industry insider. This show is likely reaching more of a teen audience and less of a family audience than The Flintstones are doing in London, but it makes up for Southern’s bizarre timeshifting of Ready Steady Go! to Sunday afternoons.

Emergency – Ward 10 (note the placement of the dash) at 7.30pm is ATV’s hugely popular networked soap opera – Crossroads not starting until November – which had begun its run in February 1957. The continuing story of a hospital filled with implausibly good looking staff and patients – one of the latter dying each episode – was a cash cow for ATV… but not enough of one. The company felt that to make real money, it needed to sell abroad, and soap operas with their continuing storylines don’t sell very well, especially in America where syndication makes telling a linear story difficult. For that reason, in September 1966 it was converted to a one-hour series of discrete, easier-to-sell dramas with very few continuing storylines, and not much in the way of plot or character development. This may have been easier to sell to the Americans, but it was a hard sell for the British, who deserted the series in droves, and it was cancelled in July 1967.

What to do with American imports? Whilst the hour long dramas had a lot to recommend them, the half hour comedies had the awful problem of being immensely popular yet not very good (by the standards of British programme makers, at least). The popularity, when combined with how cheap they were for ATV to buy for the network, meant they made lots of money for ITV. But, well, the sheer embarrassment of it all. Different companies took different approaches to this issue. Granada shoved its US sitcoms out of primetime, to 6pm and 11pm, gambling that viewers would follow. The minor regions put something improving in between two sitcoms, hammocking a local documentary or a political talking heads feature in order to boost the ratings for it. Southern and Rediffusion go for the blatant approach, sticking two sitcoms on at once, bang in the middle of primetime, under the banner of it being a comedy hour. By choosing 8pm for this, they also made use of American half-hours being shorter then British ones due to the US episodes having more advertisements: with the main ITN news at 8.55, there was no need to fill the missing cumulative 5 minutes with an announcer thumbing through the TVTimes or an extended run of public information films. Southern starts with Fred MacMurray’s hit sitcom My Three Sons, followed by the perennial favourite The Beverley Hillbillies. Rediffusion goes for the excruciating Car 54, Where Are You? backed with the tolerable Hillbillies spin-off Petticoat Junction.

Love Story at 9.10pm notably doesn’t quite fill an hour, a consequence of it being made with an eye on exporting it to the US. This was a series of one-off plays in the style of Drama ’64 and Armchair Theatre, but with the overarching theme of each being, well, a love story. But the production of these plays was not easy. Since the producers had been commissioned by ATV with an eye on US sales, ATV management put heavy pressure on them to make sure each story had a happy ending. American networks like happy endings because advertising agencies like happy endings because the brands being advertised want their products associated with happy endings. British viewers and British television producers, however, like a good story first and foremost, and the better stories have sad – or even worse, inconclusive – endings. There’s much more drama and excitement in two lovers parting at the railway station, both of them in tears, than there is in two lovers catching a train together. That management pressure sometimes was very visible on screen.

At 10.05pm Southern and Anglia do the ‘major-minor’ programme swap mentioned yesterday, with Southern carrying Anglia’s The Unknown, subtitled ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’. The description makes it clear that, for purposes of showing off to the ITA, Anglia has made a local programme featuring local people; but the content is universally nonsense… er… interesting enough for it to get an outing on the network-within-a-network that the largest four minor ITV companies (Anglia, Southern, STV, TWW) ran.

Fifteen minutes of ITN begins at 10.35pm with the news headlines, which throw over to Dateline. This short but in-depth look at the news was paid for by Rediffusion who promoted it in their own region as if it were their own programme. When News at Ten launched in 1967, this was one of the programmes that was combined into it – presenting team and all – and is why News at Ten often gave their second half over to one 13-minute story: its was Dateline hiding in plain sight.

At 10.50pm is the American drama series Bus Stop. All but forgotten now, this series was very good indeed. Many episodes were directed by Robert Altman; and it featured guest appearances by later big names including James Brolin, Robert Redford, Fabian and Ellen Burstyn. A superbly high quality drama, it was slaughtered in the ratings on ABC by NBC putting Bonanza up against it and cancelled after one season. Southern is showing episode 8, one of the ones directed by Altman, which premiered in the US in November 1961.

The post Tuesday 8 September 1964 on Southern appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

Day by Day, Southern’s regional magazine, is about to be split at the ITA’s recommendation to serve the south and the south-east. The Dover transmitter had opened in January 1960, allowing Southern to sell separate adverts between the two halves of its region. But the contract renewal in 1964 had seen the ITA require Southern to do more with the area. The requirement was based on what the ITA saw as the success of turning the North and West Wales and the South Wales and West England contracts into the unified Wales and West England region upon the demise of Wales (West and North) Television and the absorption of its Teledu Cymru service into neighbouring TWW. This created the first ‘dual region’, with one company providing two services. As time passed, the Authority became more and more convinced that this was the way to run the network, culminating with officially splitting the south into a dual region in 1982 and reforming ATV into the new dual Central at the same time. Had ITV not been effectively privatised in 1991, the by-then IBA may well have looked to splitting Yorkshire along the north and west/south and east transmitter divide; they had encouraged Tyne Tees to provide at least an opt-out for the south of their region, which became a full-blown if short-lived separate news service in 1993 after TTT won its contract renewal.

The south-east programme was named Scene South East, but ran only on Wednesdays and Fridays from Friday 9 October 1964. Southern argued that there just wasn’t enough news for a 5-day opt-out; the real reason was that they were not convinced that there was enough money in it for them, given the costs of expanding Dover to a full news operation. Far cheaper to use the existing resources at Southampton.

It’s easy to talk up the rivalry between the BBC and the ITV companies based on some one-off events. For instance, Simon Dee being poached by London Weekend is said to have seen the BBC swearing to never hire him again. The reality was more that his prima donna status, his burning of his BBC bridges and the massive flop of his LWT show just made him unhireable. But that is taken as the default: jump ship from one side to the other and you can never go home again.

This, of course, isn’t true, as can be seen by Day by Day being hosted by Tony Bilbow on Monday through Wednesday. He at this point was one of the big names on BBC-2, a host of Line-Up, and yet he’s perfectly able to divide his time between Southampton and Shepherd’s Bush. Similarly, women’s programme Home at Four-Thirty, the predecessor to the dreadful Houseparty, on Tuesdays through Thursdays is hosted by Joan Bakewell, another BBC-2 Line-Up face. Don Moss, the Day by Day presenter on Thursdays and Fridays, was even better known to viewers from his popular BBC Light Programme slot and the Phillips programme on Radio Luxembourg.

6.45pm sees Sports Desk, Southern’s local sport and results programme. The presenter is Richard Davies, who would be recruited by ABC for their new World of Sport programme in January 1965 as deputy to Eamonn Andrews, becoming the lead presenter, as Dickie Davies, when LWT took over the show in 1968 and Andrews moved to Thames. His deputy would then be another Southern face: Fred Dinenage.

The networking set-up at ITV had handed control of the peak time schedules to the Big 4 – Rediffusion, ATV, Granada, ABC. The other companies were free to drift from this – and often did – but it was cheaper and more technologically convenient to stick with the Big 4’s prime time offerings. However, that same system limited the ambition of what were known internally as the ‘major minors’ in ITV – Southern, Anglia, TWW and Scottish. They all had bright ideas for network programming, but had few slots available to them. To get round this, the major minors arranged a network-within-a-network, swapping programmes that they had made that were of more than local interest, allowing them to preempt the Big 4 and assert their independence. Perhaps the most famous of these is at 7pm on Southern: TWW’s pop show Discs a Gogo. The Big 4 were not interested in another pop show, having Ready Steady Go! for weekdays and Thank Your Lucky Stars for weekends, but it was popular enough fare for Southern, Anglia and Scottish to take it, either direct from TWW or time shifted. Another example of this is TWW’s Mr & Mrs, exchanged between the major minors; it also had a version produced by Border which was shown by the remaining small companies.

The play from Granada at 8pm and 9.10pm is sufficiently important to ITV to get the cover of the TVTimes, a picture spread on page 3, a feature in the ‘Playbill’ section and a boxout taking most of the third page for Monday 7 September. This was the beginning of British alternate or counterfactual history accounts of the Second World War concentrating on what might have happened had Britain been defeated or capitulated during the period we ‘stood alone’ (with the rest of the Empire and Commonwealth, so not quite all that alone) between the fall of France and Pearl Harbor.

This play was being shown at almost the same moment that It Happened Here was debuting at the Cork Film Festival, the production of the two having co-incidentally overlapped. It Happened Here would not go on to general release until 1966, however, making The Other Man the first mass-market production of this type. Like It Happened Here, the play is set now – 1964 – with Britain having fallen to the Nazis in 1940. Michael Caine is lead character and also provides the framing device: a soldier, he attends the opening of a military museum and begins to daydream about what his life would’ve been like under Nazi occupation. He sees himself making repeated compromises with fascism until he can no longer live with himself. He tries to get himself killed by Soviet forces, but succeeds only in being torn to pieces. He is reassembled using skin, limbs and organs harvested from live concentration camp inmates and celebrated as a hero of the Third Reich. The play ends with the Nazi version and the ‘real’ version of him making almost the same speech at the same military museum opening.

The play is unusual for having been shot on videotape even for the outside scenes – something technically difficult to do in these early days of reel-to-reel videotape – to avoid the jarring change between studio video and outside film quality. Unfortunately, this has pretty well doomed the play: it had an evens chance of surviving on film, but on videotape was a prime candidate to be wiped later. All that survives in the archives of the 2 hours and 20 minutes (including commercials) is about 80 minutes divided between the start and end.

The Other Man typifies Granada of the era – ambitious, tackling an unusual subject, using new techniques for the filming, and splashing money on a cast of 200 with 60 speaking roles simply because of the importance of the piece to ITV and to British culture. The two other main play-making companies, ABC and Rediffusion, are made to look staid and conformist in comparison – Rediffusion’s The Lover of 1963 notwithstanding. All in all, this is a programme that only Granada could have made, which is the highest compliment to the Northern weekday ITV contractor one could make.

The programme at 10.35pm sounds absolutely terrible, but actually has some good at its heart. In 1964 the feminist movement was simply not heard and the status of women, which had fallen to a 20th century nadir in the 1950s, was never thought to be discussed. Even socially conscious ABC was avoiding the subject whilst happy to talk about racism, divorce and abortion. The idea of equal rights for women was something almost nobody was thinking about. Southern’s programme, Up the Poll, asks “does more independence make women less feminine?” but this is a trojan horse for letting someone say the truth out-loud on air: that it doesn’t matter either way and ‘feminine’ is no measure for anything. This is perhaps let down by the coupon asking readers of the TVTimes to vote on the question – no good ever comes of these types of self-selecting polls. The question as to whether the programme changed anyone’s mind is interesting, but the poll will be weighed down with people voting without watching it and without knowledge, making the results pointless.

In another example of blurring the boundaries between the BBC and ITV, the compere of Up the Poll is Leslie Dunn, better known to audiences then as Paul Johnson, husband of Christine Archer, in BBC radio’s The Archers.

Granada’s All Our Yesterdays is at 7pm on most of the network but bumped to the specific time of 11.07pm on Southern. The programme looked back 25 years ago that week – which is the equivalent of us looking back to 1993 now – and this week is a special edition, marking a quarter of a century since the outbreak of World War II. Instead of newsreel clips linked by Brian Inglis, Granada invites people with memories of the war to come in, which at this time is basically everybody over the age of 30. Indeed, anybody over the age of 43 – just into middle age – had been in the forces or doing war work at home, whilst anybody in the major cities aged 25 or over had experienced an air raid, even if they were too young to remember it. It’s worth remembering that ITV had only been running 9 years by this point, and its beginning in 1955 had happened whilst some pharmaceuticals – including Ribena – were still under wartime control orders and required coupons as well as money to buy; meanwhile production of cheese was still under government direction and was often hard to find, officials preferring to make sure domestic milk by the pint was in good supply.

The post Monday 7 September 1964 on Southern appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

One of the few Pilkington Committee recommendations that the ITA accepted was a request for ITV to switch from Outside Broadcasts being all sport – and all horse racing at that – to using the large fleets to present more live non-sport material happening around the UK. To help this, the Postmaster General increased the annual allowance for OBs from 250 hours a year to 300 in 1964. This all led to there being more innovation in OBs, something that had been in danger of dying out when the units were just seen as a sports service.

An example is the Morning Service on Sunday 6 September 1964. Instead of sending the OB unit to a cathedral or large church nearby last night’s football game, ATV’s OB crew (well, Rediffusion’s crew, paid for by ATV) head to Gilwell Park, the headquarters of the British scouting movement, in Epping Forest, with the service being held around the camp fire.

Another example on Southern is them coming on for cricket at 1.15pm. This isn’t the usual test match or international game that would be networked by one of the Big 4 companies. Instead, Southern cameras head out to Hambledon in Hampshire to watch The Lord’s Taverners take on the crew of HMS Mercury in a friendly amateur afternoon game. This is of pure regional interest, and perhaps even just local interest to people in Hampshire, and something ITV could do better in its federal system than the monolithic BBC even with 2 channels now at its disposal.

This is followed by something else that regional ITV did better than the BBC or the Big 4 ‘national’ ITV companies: microserving specific regional interests. Southern’s farming programme is one of many shown around ITV in roughly this slot in areas like Westward, Border and Anglia. There’s no equivalent in London for obvious reasons. ABC is the exception, having a farming slot, albeit firmly aimed at viewers in its fringes – Lincolnshire and Westmoreland – and in the broad swathe of agricultural land in the north Midlands and the south of the North region. Even then, ABC’s programme had more of a ‘national farming service’ feel – like the BBC’s farming programmes – and little of the deep understanding of regional agricultural issues the smaller ITV companies could bring.

ITV’s system of networking saw the Big 4 companies (Granada, ABC, Rediffusion, ATV) decide the schedules for primetime ITV between them, so the two or three companies on air at any one time largely kept the same programmes in the same slots. The smaller companies followed this, as it was easier and cheaper to take a ‘live’ feed from the network than to time shift with their own facilities. Where there were disagreements between the Big 4 and programmes going out in different slots or on different days – The Avengers on Sundays on ABC and Thursdays on Rediffusion, for instance – this allowed flexibility for the minor regions: they could choose which feed to take.

Such a difference of opinion existed between Granada and Rediffusion over Ready, Steady, Go! Rediffusion showed it at 7pm on Friday, timed to catch the older teenagers before they went out dancing at 8pm. Granada held it until after 10pm, waiting for the younger teenagers to come home.

Southern’s choice was to ignore either of these potential options and instead time shift RSG! in their own region… to 2.48pm on a Sunday afternoon. As to who that was supposed to target is now lost to us; more by coincidence than design it does directly compete with the off-shore ‘pirate’ pop stations that were springing up around the south coast of England at that time and targeting ITV’s younger viewers and hipper advertisers.

Weekends are full of sport and religion, neither of which count towards the daily maximum hours. Throw in some adult education, as ATV and ABC do in the early afternoon, and you’ve got a ten-hour broadcasting day. This allows for entertainment programmes to run from 2.30pm, catching a lucrative family audience. This was much to the chagrin of Rediffusion on weekdays, with little or no religion and sport – horse racing simply being a bloc in the afternoons – shutting them out from getting a family audience in front of the TV before dinnertime. For the smaller companies, and ATV in London, the Sunday afternoon slot created by all the uncounted hours of programming, was used to run repeats and burn off material they couldn’t find a place for – perhaps explaining why RSG! is here on Southern. For ABC, family audiences were always the goal, as they were great to sell to advertising agencies: get the kids to clamour Dad for a product, get Dad to give the money to Mum for it, send Mum off to the shops on Monday morning with the money and the product both fresh in her mind. For this reason, quality ABC programming is often seen in this period debuting on a Sunday afternoon. Networked on 6 September is Miss Adventure, a comedy drama vehicle for Hattie Jacques that would’ve worked well in the evening, but here is perfect for mopping up the entire family before dinner.

4.15pm sees Fireball XL5 hit Southern screens. Before the word “green” was in use in politics, the go-to word for a concern for the environment was “ecology”. Before that word, people talked about “the problems of pollution”. This was as close as most people got to worrying holistically about the sustainability of modern society. One of the surprising places where this concept is given voice is Fireball XL5. The series had a strong thread of compassion running through it, with Steve Zodiac, Venus and Professor Matthew Matic worrying about their impact on the universe, taking care not to disturb alien environments and always keeping one eye on pollution.

In today’s episode, a planet is found where mining operations have fundamentally undermined the whole globe. What can be done? The top bosses decide that disintegrating it will make for a safer galaxy. But the puppet stars take time to worry about the disintegration causing further pollution in space. And they take a trip to the surface to make sure that the planet is indeed uninhabited and uninhabitable. While there, they find a thriving civilisation to which the abandoned mine shafts are home – a new, liveable environment having been made out of a previously inhospitable one. The disintegration must therefore be stopped and the planet cared for: a bold deviation from the way things were done at the time.

The later reaches of Sunday afternoons were seen as a good place to put on films, with the perception that Dads would watch while the Mums were making dinner or supper, depending on when the main Sunday meal was eaten – it varied by class. Granada was delegated the job of buying in Hollywood films, probably on the back of their experience with the Granada Theatres chain in the south-east of England. But there were two other film companies involved in ITV, both of them also running huge national cinema chains. ABC was owned by the Associated British Picture Corporation, and therefore films on or offered to the network from ABC tended to be from the ABPC/Warner stable. Southern was part-owned (and controlled by) the Rank Organisation, so it offered films from Rank’s huge back catalogue. This Sunday across the network is 1955’s Track The Man Down, featuring singer Petula Clark. This one has probably come from ATV, with the film having been made by British Lion at Nettlefold Studios, which had been bought by Sapphire Films using ATV’s Incorporated Television Company subsidiary’s money.

In the 1950s, all television was banned for an hour on Sunday evenings by the Postmaster General to make sure it didn’t distract from people going to Evensong at their local church. ABC lobbied hard for this to be relaxed, suggesting instead that television should serve people who couldn’t go to church – people who were regular churchgoers would remain regular churchgoers, but the old, the disabled and people with childcare responsibilities were being denied a chance at getting some God-time in, and TV would bring it to them. The PMG saw sense in the late 1950s and allowed that hour to be used for religious and moral discussion, celebration and contemplation – and nothing else. ABC’s response was The Sunday Break, designed as a church youth club of the air.

Of the three heavier members of the Big 4, Rediffusion had become famous for its hard-hitting documentaries, whilst Granada had created a virtual monopoly on deep investigative journalism. ABC had a soft spot for looking at social issues, which would become all the more of interest to the public following the election in October returning a Labour government and the appointment in 1965 of the liberal reformer Roy Jenkins as Home Secretary, leading to the suspension of capital punishment, abortion and divorce reform, abolition of theatre censorship, a reduction in the voting age from 21 to 18 and the partial decriminalisation of male homosexuality. All of these subjects had been discussed across various ABC programmes in the 1960s, and this evening The Sunday Break, now more focussed on ‘morals’ than religion, turns its social reformist eye to ‘the colour bar’ – or racism as we now call it. At this point in time it was legal to incite racial hatred and refuse to serve, employ or house people of colour (that would also change under Labour, with the Race Relations Act 1965). Was this morally acceptable? The group of young people in the club discussed the matter and decided that no, it was not.

At 8.25pm the ITV network goes to Blackpool with ABC. This programme had its roots in a dispute between ABC and ATV. The two weekend companies had often descended to petty bickering over costs and scheduling, caused by one of the iniquities of the ITV setup. The original design of ITV was for competition to be the key in everything it did. It would compete with the BBC for audience, but also within itself for programmes. This, it was felt, would drive costs down whilst driving quality up. As usual, this didn’t work and ITV settled into a cosy duopoly with the BBC. The one part of the plan that did survive was how payments for programmes were allocated. The Big 4, making the majority of programmes, charged roughly two thirds of the cost to the other 3. For instance, a Rediffusion show made for £10,000 would be paid for by Rediffusion paying £4,000, Granada paying £4,000 and ATV Midlands paying £2,000 (reflecting its lower population size compared to the other two regions). As more ITV companies started broadcasting, that system remained, with the Big 4 selling each others’ programmes en bloc on to each company in an affiliate model and recouping some costs that way.

ABC and ATV London, however, was where this system failed. If ATV made a programme for £10,000, ABC had to pay £6,600 for it or come up with a replacement – not easy when ATV, Delfont, the two Grades and Val Parnell controlled virtually all the London talent between them. Making it worse was ABC’s suspicion that ATV were inflating the prices of each programme, to the point where ABC were paying four fifths or nine tenths of the cost while ATV pocketed the rest as profit. Howard Thomas and Lew Grade had stand-up arguments over this, with Grade waving invoices at Thomas to prove that costs were fair, whilst Thomas noted that the waving, and strategically placed thumbs and cigar ash, prevented him from double checking.

In 1963, the most popular light entertainment programme on ITV was Val Parnell’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium, made by ATV. The price per episode continued to climb across the year, until the show became uneconomic for ABC and they refused to pay until it was audited. ATV’s response was to threaten to withhold the programme from ABC, leaving them with an expensive hour to fill by themselves at the heart of primetime on lucrative Sunday nights, with ATV not paying in and it being unlikely that ABC’s small number of affiliated ITV regions would want to show the replacement nor pay for it.

But Howard Thomas decided that a line needed to be drawn, and that line was Blackpool Night Out. By using ABC’s own recently refurbished theatre in Blackpool, and drawing upon talent appearing in summer season in the northern holiday resorts, they could keep costs down and make sure that Delfont and the Grades couldn’t use their dominance over the London scene to intervene. The resulting show cost less than ABC had been paying ATV, drew the same sized audiences and kept the other ITV companies on side. ATV London had no choice but to show it, and to pay a third of the costs, the pound cost of which became the benchmark for similar programmes, and the Palladium show, in future.

Casebook at 10.35pm is unusual. This isn’t a TV series – it’s an Anglo-Amalgamated B-feature for use in cinemas, running as a short between the newsreel and the main feature in the days when cinema screenings were on a loop (you came in at any point and left when you reached the point that you’d come in at – a practice that was normal then but seems totally mad now). Anglo-Amalgamated were 50% owned and controlled by APBC, ABC’s parent, so these types of series came cheap for ITV. The cherishably named Edgar Lustgarten was not a famous criminologist. He was famous, but for his voiceover work (it’s him that Charles Gray is mimicking in The Rocky Horror Picture Show) and his crime novels, which were dramatic retellings of true crime stories. The series was known as The Scales of Justice when Associated-British Pathé sold it into syndication in the US.

With 7 hours allowed for general entertainment a day, ITV would be off by 11pm in accordance with the rules. To push things closer to a more natural bedtime, half an hour of adult education, not counted, gets inserted at the end of the day. As usual with adult education programmes shown late at night, it’s debatable as to whether tonight’s show, To Hell With Culture…?, is actually educational. From the description, it sounds like something London Weekend would be putting out at 9pm on Sundays in 1969, and indeed seems to be arguing for London Weekend’s failed policy of bringing arts and culture to the masses at peak times.

The post Sunday 6 September 1964 on Southern appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

Independent Television had a golden age in the 1960s, and nowhere more so than 1964.

The worries over contract renewals and the Pilkington Report were now both in the past. The former had seen the Independent Television Authority roll over all the existing contracts, giving certainty to the system, whilst increasing the ITA’s say in ITV affairs, especially in terms of requiring more heavyweight and educational programming.

The latter had been so hard on ITV and so lauded the BBC that its results were largely ignored by everybody as being from a surreal counter-universe, and thus the ITV companies no longer had the worries and distraction of giving evidence to the Committee compiling the report.

The big threat, as ITV saw it, was the coming of BBC-2. This caused the ITV companies to up their game, fearful that BBC-2 would become a dumping ground for BBCtv’s heavier and less popular fare. That turned out to be largely a empty threat, but by then the investment in counter-programming against a revitalised BBC-1 had been made. Additionally, after the financial setbacks of the 1950s and the heavy investment required by the new regional companies after ITV started, most contractors were now in profit, and for the larger ones, so much in profit that they barely knew what to do with all that money, other than invest it in diversifications and, of course, back into programmes.

Of 1964 itself, the strongest season was the autumn/winter schedule at the end of the year – summer schedules on ITV always being high on repeats and low on innovation with the audience not present due to sunshine and holidays.

While we’re not saying that the week of Southern Television output we’ve decided to look at here is the best week of that new schedule, it’s certainly representative and very strong. The ITA had taken Pilkington and the stronger powers it gained from the Television Act 1964 and the renewal of contracts at the beginning of the year to toughen up its quotas of heavier material and to push for more of innovative programming in peak time across the network.

That’s what you can see in these pages. The drama, arts and documentary strands are now largely in the peak rather than hovering around 6pm and 11pm. New formats are being tried, old ones are being changed. The public service ethos that ITV had shown until the financial calamity of 1956/7 is back, but this time not a version of the BBC’s stuffy output. The plays are innovative and different from what has gone before. The amount of music, and not just the new ‘pop’ kind, has increased and is being presented in new ways. Even the quiz shows are going off at unusual angles. And audience participation – this TVTimes has two coupons to return to vote on the outcomes in different programmes – has come back into fashion.

The country and the economy were changing in the 1960s, and 1964 marks the point that the post-war baby boom children start leaving school and going into work en masse. And go into work they did – there was full employment and labour shortages in many sectors, so a 15-year old with their School Certificate could leave school in June and start work in July. With the majority of them still living at home, this gave teenagers a disposable income for the first time in history. And dispose of it they did, on records and at the cinema and on consumer goods. Suddenly the advertisers woke up to this new source of income, and wanted programmes that would reach the teenagers so they could reach into their pockets. As we will see, ITV responds well, providing something of interest to teenagers – and not just ‘family viewing’ – every day.

We have chosen Southern Television for another reason. The first phase of ITV was designed to create an internal market between the various companies, with each region picking and choosing between the best programmes of the other regions, thus driving up quality. But ITV’s shaky finances and the slow progress of the Post Office in creating a co-axial network that allowed companies to take programmes from any other company rather than taking the feed from their nearest neighbour had stymied this. Instead, the regional companies signed affiliation deals with the major companies, promising to show all of their programmes and whichever other programmes the major company had bought from its rivals. The contracts were written to hold each regional company to that deal, preventing them from properly shopping about, even if the co-axial network let them.

These arrangements were torn up in 1964. Regional companies still took their programmes from one of the major providers, but now that major provider could not refuse to let them pick and choose from what else was available. ITV’s individual schedules, which had been roughly the same in peak time across the network for years, started to look as different in peak as they had done off-peak before. The largest of the minor companies – Southern, Anglia, TWW and Scottish – took the opportunity to create a network-within-a-network, swapping their previously regional-only non-news programmes between themselves and giving them a new power to compete with the majors.

This was nowhere more true than at Southern. They were the richest of the minor companies, with a turnover greater than ABC and profits that rivalled Rediffusion. They had money to spend, not only on their own programmes, but also on programmes for the major-minor network, and to choose between the offerings of the major companies. They didn’t have the network responsibilities of the majors, but also had a largely homogenous region that was easy to cover, without the huge peaks and troughs of mansions and slums that made covering the major regions a tough job.

Southern stand out of the crowd, and their schedule is therefore the most interesting we could find: not the solid network fare of ATV or Rediffusion, nor the hyper-local service of Border or Westward. It’s wrong to make generalisations from specifics, but the Southern schedule for 6-12 September 1964 provides a great opportunity to see how ITV at its zenith worked.

The post A week in September 1964 on Southern appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

The 9.25pm main bulletin from ITN on Sunday 22 March 1964 with Huw Thomas giving us the top stories.

Do watch until the end, where Huw makes a terrible pun: his reaction to doing so is perfect.

The post ITN News on 22 March 1964 appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

Trevor Lucas takes us through an evening of ATV London programming by slowly getting closer and closer and closer to the camera. When edited together like this, the effect is really quite creepy.

The post ATV London on 22 March 1964 appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

Current Affairs

The network’s main current affairs programmes are This Week (Rediffusion), World in Action (Granada) and ITN’s Weekly Report, all of 30 minutes’ duration and transmitted weekly.

This Week seeks to interpret, by special film reports, studio interviews and discussions, current developments of political or sociological significance, both at home and abroad; each edition is devoted to one or two topics. Material during 1964 included reports on some major issues of the British General Election, full-length interviews with leaders of the three main political parties in Britain, accounts of the situation in East Africa, poverty in the USA, Rumania’s concept of national communism, and an examination of important sociological questions such as divorce, society and the psychopath, and fatherless families. In addition to its regular series, This Week from time to time presents special reports, examples during 1964 including programmes on cancer, the Greater London Council elections and the Christmas road deaths.

World in Action presents in depth a major story of current interest. Topics in 1964 included H.M. the Queen’s visit to Canada, Senator Goldwater’s nomination as Presidential candidate, the death of Lord Beaverbrook, and the Aberdeen typhoid outbreak.

ITN’s Weekly Report provides a close-up on the big news stories of the week.

Another current affairs series transmitted over a number of Independent Television areas is What the Papers Say (Granada), in which a well-known journalist reviews the treatment given by the Press to the week’s news. Regular contributors have included Michael Frayn, Bernard Levin and Brian Inglis.

A number of short series of current affairs programmes have included The Outsiders (ATV), which considered three minority groups in North America; and Press and Presidency (ATV), in which foreign journalists described their countries’ attitudes to the US Presidential Election.

Most of the programme companies produce regular current affairs series for transmission in their own areas. There is a wide range of subject matter and treatment, but the emphasis generally is on local participation or topics of particular interest to local viewers. Series of Party political broadcasts continue in accordance with the agreement between the broadcasting authorities and the Parliamentary parties. In addition, extensive coverage is given on Independent Television to the Party conferences, local and Parliamentary elections are reported fully by ITN and the programme companies.

Features

On alternate Wednesdays Independent Television presents, in the form of a documentary feature programme, an extended study of a subject of world or national significance. Produced in turn by Rediffusion, ATV and Granada, they are intended to give a comprehensive account of a major area of politics or sociology. Recent examples have included programmes on tribalism in modern Africa, current social changes in Iran, economic pressures in Italy, studies of Lenin, George V, Baldwin and Hitler, and an examination of mixed marriages in Britain.

Most of the programme companies from time to time produce feature programmes for transmission in their own areas.

Science and Natural History

Series on science or natural history are an established feature of Independent Television’s output. They are usually presented as regular weekly programmes over a period of several months. Recent series have included The Enemies Within (ATV), which considered certain illnesses in the light of current medical research; Survival (Anglia) on wild life preservation; People Like Us (Granada), studies in animal behaviour; and Another World (Granada), on aspects of natural history. Southern Television provided live coverage of the British Association’s annual conference.

Practical and Outdoor

Nearly all the programme companies produce one or more regular weekly series of practical and outdoor magazine programmes. A major group is that of the farming magazines, which, while catering specifically for the interest and needs of the local farming community, often appeal to a wider public. There are a few general country series and some gardening programmes. Several series deal with various aspects of domestic science.

Miscellaneous

Each week during most of the year outstanding documentary films have again been presented by John Grierson in This Wonderful World (Scottish). Another regular weekly series All Our Yesterdays (Granada), considers events of twenty-five years ago and makes fascinating use of contemporary newsreel film. After Dinner (ATV), a series of late-evening conversations featuring distinguished women, was introduced in August 1964. A series of interviews with highly successful young people was presented in The Young Tigers (Rediffusion). Among other programmes available in many ITA areas were On the Braden Beat (ATV), a satirical commentary on the contemporary scene, and Fair Play (ATV), in which grievances of the individual are discussed. In addition, there have been a number of local documentary series and individual programmes.

Features

Feature programmes are presented regularly on alternate Wednesdays by Associated Television, Rediffusion and Granada. Examples during 1964 were:

Many other feature programmes are produced from time to time by the various companies. A few examples are given below:

Current Affairs

Personal

Practical and Outdoor

Miscellaneous

Some of the many other documentary programmes produced during 1964 are listed below:

L. Local
P. Part Network
N. Network

The post Documentaries on ITV in 1964 appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

This didn’t happen – the change of government in October 1964 scuppered the plans, as the Labour Party was ideologically opposed to expanding commercial broadcasting and would have preferred a BBC-3 educational television service, incorporating their planned University of the Air.

Here are the words of Lord Hill of Luton, the chairman of the ITA, from August 1963 as he announced what the Authority planned to do with the existing ITV service in the run up to ITV-2.

My main subject today is the shape, the pattern, the structure. Two main changes lie ahead. Firstly, there is the change to 625 lines and UHF. Secondly, there is the declaration of intention of the Government announced by the Postmaster-General on 27th June in relation to the second Independent Television service. You will remember his words: ‘if all goes well and there are suitable companies willing to offer their services to the ITA, the Government would certainly hope during the autumn of 1965 to authorize the physical build-up of the second programme, starting in the areas of big population’.

With these words in mind the Authority’s planning for the future must be based on the assumption that there is to be a second Independent Television service over much of the country. Therefore it has to begin as soon as possible to plan and prepare for Independent Television’s second phase – the two service phase.

On the assumption that the Government’s intention is fulfilled, the Authority has already resolved how the second phase shall begin. It contemplates that for the areas of denser population there shall be competition between two independent companies operating over the full week, and so for the viewer a choice between two independent television services. According to what is decided in the mapping out of these areas of denser population, there will be six or more seven-day companies competing in pairs. The Authority proposes, as soon as it has completed its urgent work in relation to the interim phase, to get down to the task of planning that second phase on these lines.

The basic plan for the second phase, which I have described, will change the face of television over much of the country. There will be changes of coverage, in terms of both areas and days. There will be openings for new companies in these highly populated regions and no doubt smaller companies then operating may wish to consider applying for the larger franchises.

Clearly the same contract cannot apply to the second phase with all its profound change as well as the period immediately ahead – the interim phase. It follows that the immediate contracts will have to end when the second service begins.

What should be the duration of the contracts soon to be awarded? In other words, when can we expect the second service? The Postmaster-General said it could be on the air in 1966 – and then went on to stress what he described as the very real hurdles. The actual date will depend on, amongst other things, the P.M.G.s decision, after having the advice of his Television Advisory Committee, on the method and timing of duplication on 625 of the two existing television services – a complicated problem which I will not go into now except to say that it affects the dates by which the Post Office could have the links available. In all the circumstances, the Authority’s judgment is that the second service will become possible at some time between the autumn of 1966 and mid-1967.

As the immediate contracts have to be related to the expected date of the launching of a second service, the Authority has decided that their duration should be three years, subject to four points. The first is that should the second service begin before the expiry of three years – this is possible but by no means certain – then the contracts will terminate when it begins. Secondly, should the announced date of commencement of the second service be after July 1967, contracts will continue (subject to a reconsideration of rentals in the light of experience) until the second service arrives, up to a total period of six years. Thirdly, any contract terminated by the arrival of the second service and applying only to an area in no way affected by its introduction will be renewed, subject to the six-year maximum and to reconsideration of rental. Fourthly, if for any reason it becomes apparent that a second service cannot be introduced before 1970, there will be no extension of the three-year contracts and the Authority will re-examine the whole pattern on the basis of a single service.

The question which now arises is whether there shall be a fundamental re-casting of the pattern from next July, bearing in mind that a drastic re-shaping is likely to occur two or three years later. Clearly it would be wrong to do anything in the interim phase which prejudices the long-term plan. A number of ideas, as you know, have been put forward. It has been suggested that a seven-day service should be introduced for the Midlands with or without a change from the 5:2 pattern to a 4: 3 pattern in London and the North. You know the objections equally well. The 4:3 pattern, involving the addition of a day to the weekend and a reduction of weekdays, is in conflict with the pattern of most of our lives – five days work and two days recreation. For myself I dislike this variation.

Should a seven-day service be introduced for the Midlands, the successful company knowing that a few years later there will be a competitor in the same area and for the same days? Some might think yes. On balance, because what lies immediately ahead is an interim period during which the second phase will be planned and those years will be the period when the expanded competition of the BBC will be felt, the Authority has decided not to submit Independent Television to two upheavals in a few years. With certain modifications, the existing pattern of days and hours will continue during the interim phase. Let me make it absolutely clear that what I have said relates solely to the pattern of days and areas – of supply that is – not of companies. Present companies and new companies are to apply for any area they choose. All bets are off and there will be a fair field for all.

The post Preparing for ITV-2 appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

I SANG, standing under the bright finger of the spotlight in the dim little dance hall, and the screams of the girls rang in my ears.

They were screaming for me. Me. It had never happened before. I felt a kind of excitement which I afterwards had difficulty explaining in words. I was 18 and felt like King Kong.

Girls at my feet, girls all around me, girls breaking into my dressing-room… I loved it. Being truthful, I would say I’m a conceited person, but conceited was hardly a big enough word for me then.

Looking back to those days when I first appeared in public — in Tonbridge, Kent — I wince. The truth is I must have been downright objectionable. I can see myself now, swaggering around, or racing about on the motor-bike I’d bought, with my leather jacket and my guitar strapped to my back and my hair flying in the wind and my sideboards right down to my Adam’s apple.

I hope I’ve grown up since then. Conceited I still may be — but at least that conceit is tempered with a sense of humour and a sense of responsibility.

And the certainty that the screams aren’t for me but for an image… an elusive, intangible thing which doesn’t really belong either to me or the girls.

I’ve always had lots of girl-friends. But how many people would believe that I am basically shy? And that shyness made living a misery for me when I was a small boy? One reason for it was because of the way I spoke.

I was born Richard Sarstedt in Delhi, India, the son of a father who had German blood and an Irish mother. My father died when I was 12 and the family — my mother, aunt, sister and two brothers — came to England and settled in Waddon, near Croydon, in Surrey.

And I had this accent, sort of Indian. One couldn’t help acquiring it. When I started to go to school — it was co-educational — I felt very self-conscious. It made me painfully so with girls.

I remember I used to like showing off in front of girls in sport. I was a good all-rounder and it was the only way I could express my interest. I was particularly good at swimming.

It was a small school. But I didn’t dare speak to a girl until I was 15.

After that, girls began to loom large in my legend — as Beatle George Harrison would say!

When I left school I wanted to be an architect and went into an architect’s office as a tea boy. There was the girl who was the first person to tell me I could sing… the girl who pushed me into the talent contest which made it all happen and who, I think, I would have married if my career hadn’t come between us.

Then there were the two girls who were friends until the night one walked into a restaurant where I was dining the other and discovered I was dating them both. She poured the soup into her friend’s lap…

There have been other girls in my life, of course. Girls I have been genuinely fond of, girls I’ve had to be seen with for publicity, girls I’ve taken out because they were there and I was there. Girls whose faces, never mind names, don’t come to mind.

Where do I stand now? My mother looks after me well, so I’m not contemplating marriage, yet!

I am still basically shy, and fans, particularly older ones, can embarrass me. Almost always you’ll get the one girl among those who come backstage who’ll throw herself at you.

But I always think twice. As I said, I’m conceited—and that’s a help in this instance. I know these girls are only interested in the image, not me. And that makes it much easier to be sensible.

Most fans are only 12 or 13 and they promise to go away if they get your autograph. I have three or four girls who follow me all over the country.

And another 13-year-old who writes me two 10-page letters — on both sides — each week, ending up: “I love you best of anybody in the world.”

This may sound smug — but I feel a responsibility to fans like that. The ones who annoy me are the ones who scratch their names on my car or scrawl lipstick messages all over it. I’ve had to dispose of two cars because girls have made such a mess of them.

You may think a pop singer’s reputation makes girls fall at his feet? Take my word for it — it doesn’t. It could, with hundreds of girls you don’t want to know. But when, suddenly, you find a girl you really would like to know it becomes difficult… because she’s annoyed about that reputation and refuses to be added to a “list.”

Still, that’s one of the prices which must be paid. Like never being sure I can come and go peaceably from the house.

There are girls outside my home every day. They’re mostly young and just want to talk to me. But when I go to play tennis at a recreation ground nearby—though we always try and go when few people are about — it’s like Wimbledon! I don’t mind because I play a fair game of tennis.

But I’ve got knobbly knees!

The post Girls girls girls appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

BY any standards, the Claypole family of Mill Hill, London, is a large one. It numbers nearly 130 — bearing in mind, of course, that the family includes a “zoo”.

Richard, who is 16 and attends Mill Hill Public School, has been passionately fond of most things that walk, crawl or fly since he was five.

So much so, that his back-garden collection now totals something like 120.

Add to that his sister Jackie’s two ponies, Tippin and Jassamine, and Mum and Dad’s two Old English sheepdogs, Ming and Nana, and you have just about the full complement.

Richard can be seen in Zoo Time on Wednesday. When I talked to him it didn’t take me long to realise what a dedicated young zoologist he is.

He’s a member of the XYZ (Young Zoologists) Club, and a familiar figure to the keepers at London Zoo.

Most of his own collection are reptiles or amphibians, which he keeps in a heated greenhouse. But there is also a hairy armadillo and a badger cub.

How did it all start?

“When I was about five,” Richard said, “I became interested in insects. From there I went on to reptiles, including green lizards and a grass snake.

“Now I have 49 different species and about 120 items. And, of course, the collection is growing because there are always some of them breeding.”

For many people, the biggest problem with a zoo such as Richard’s would be feeding. But he takes that in his stride.

“The reptiles eat worms; my owls have chicken heads, which I get from the butcher; I breed locusts for the toads and frogs; Mr. Todd, the badger, gets horsemeat and breakfast cereal; and the armadillo has mincemeat, milk and chopped fruit.”

In most cases, the only thing standing between a boy and the pet of his choice — particularly if it happens to be a little offbeat — is Mum. But Richard has no trouble with his.

“She got used to seeing caterpillars wandering all over the place,” he said, “and eventually took the rest as a matter of course. Well almost…

“I don’t keep snakes any more, because she doesn’t like them.”

How does Dad react to the zoo? “Oh, very favourably,” Mr. Claypole said. “It gives Richard a lively and real interest.

“And I would certainly far rather he did what he is doing than a lot of the things in which the modern generation indulges.”

Thirteen-year-old Jackie is more concerned with her ponies than with her brother’s collection, though occasionally she brings friends along to see the latest additions.

Most of her spare time is spent riding and show jumping, and a pile of rosettes is evidence of her success over the fences.

Mr. and Mrs. Claypole’s two sheep dogs appeared in a film with Richard Attenborough and have been featured in a number of TV commercials. Most families have their “black sheep,” and with the Claypoles it’s Mr. Todd, the badger.

He is only half grown, but already he weighs more than 201b.

And he has decidedly destructive tendencies, even though some of them are unintentional.

“I’m afraid he may have to go fairly soon,” Richard said sadly.

What does Richard intend doing when he leaves school?

“I haven’t settled for any career yet,” he said. But I think it probably will be something involving animals.

“Either that, or I shall have animals as a sideline. You know, importing and exporting them.”

The post Boy with 120 pets appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

A pretty woman, a handsome man, figures clambering up a mountainside and a row of incinerators. Why these pictures? What is the connection? Watch ITV’s dramatic production The Other Man, by Giles Cooper, on Monday.

The Other Man

AN epic play on a disturbing theme — that is The Other Man, the two-and-a-half hour production on Monday.

It is the longest play ever to be seen on one night on ITV. And that’s not all. Including extras, there are 200 people in the cast, 60 with speaking roles.

Fifty technicians were needed to record roughly 10 hours of tape, which has taken weeks to edit. Two weeks were spent on location.

Sorry, I cannot reveal anything of the story. I do not want to spoil the impact of this exceptionally serious and original work—brainchild of one of television’s outstanding writers, Giles Cooper.

There is, however, no doubt that, having switched on, you will not be able to leave it until the end.

Giles Cooper’s script has been expanded from a four-page idea to its present length — 240 pages. He has worked closely from the beginning with director Gordon Flemyng and producer Gerald Savory.

The three have thrashed out plot details until in its final form the play is a taut drama, entirely tailored to the needs of television.

“Until now epics of this proportion,” said Gordon Flemyng, “have been the preserve of the films. Now I think we have achieved one for TV.

“I have tried to open up the medium to show that it is capable of good large-scale, as well as small-scale, work. For the first time, 1 believe, all outside scenes have been shot outside.

“To avoid a quality change from film to videotape, all the exterior scenes have been shot on tape, too, also for the first time. 1 think this adds to the real-life quality of the production.”

The cast is headed by Michael Caine as George Grant and Sian Phillips as his wife Kate. Michael, a South Londoner, told me: “Until I was cast as the infantry officer in the film ‘Zulu’ I had always played ordinary Cockney types.

“When he was casting ‘Zulu’, Stanley Baker remembered me from a role I had played in another of his productions, and I got the part of an officer in the South Wales Borderers.”

On location in South Africa the Zulus nicknamed Michael “The Child of Heaven” because of his long, curling blond locks. They were in fact “having him on,” Zulu-style.

Sian Phillips is married to actor Peter O’Toole. She began acting when she was four — as a fairy in her mother’s Welsh school plays. At 11, she became a professional on radio and stage. She played her first adult role when she was 15.

The post The Other Man appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.