Never before has there been such comprehensive coverage of an election. It will be the most complex combined operation in the history of the BBC. For the first time all three radio services are involved, and broadcasting will continue throughout the night. Says Stephen Bonarjee, editor of Current Affairs, Sound: ‘By grouping our resources we can offer a wide choice. For example — an election-night party on the Light, a fast service of key results on the Home, a methodical reporting of full results in the Third Network. But all will be complementary so that listeners can switch from one to another.’

The radio master plan embraces all the BBC regional studios as well as five studios in Broadcasting House, London, each with a specialised purpose in feeding the main operation with such ingredients as news of key results, outside broadcasts from constituencies — there will be over thirty outside-broadcast points all over the country — and expert comment.

BBC-tv will have over fifty cameras in strategic positions such as the vital constituencies and those which traditionally declare early; in Trafalgar Square, in clubs and pubs, and university meeting places. Explains Paul Fox, Head of Public Affairs, Television: ‘We plan to bring in the results swiftly, underline their significance as they happen, and provide the best possible comment not only from our own team of commentators but from people who have actually taken part in the day’s events. The engineering problem alone is a staggering one. Even with studios as modern as those at TV Centre the control room has had to be extended to handle all the incoming traffic from outside broadcast units, regional studios, and a host of special telephones.’

A recent complete dummy-run of the election programme as it will happen during the night was based on the 1959 election for timing purposes, but the results that came through were those predicted, as far as possible, for 1964. What were they? That is strictly off the record. See and view for yourself this week — as it happens.

A PLAIN MAN’S GUIDE compiled by David Butler

A PLAIN MAN’S GUIDE compiled by David Butler

1: Terms those commentators use

There are 630 constituencies in the United Kingdom and more than 1,700 candidates.

DEPOSIT Any candidate who fails to secure one eighth (12.5%) of the valid votes in his constituency forfeits to the Exchequer a deposit of £150.

STRAIGHT FIGHT This term is used when only two candidates are standing in a constituency.

MARGINAL SEATS There is no precise definition of a marginal seat. It is a seat where there was a small majority at the last election or a seat that is likely to change hands. Sometimes people call seats with majorities of under 5,000, or under 10%, ‘marginals.’ But one can only decide when all the results are in what seats really were marginal. However, it is easy to list the thirty, or the fifty, or the 100 most marginal Conservative and Labour seats on the basis of the 1959 results and to discuss them.

SWING This word is used to describe in a single figure the change in the position of the Conservative and Labour parties since the last election. Swing is normally defined as the average of the change in the Conservative and Labour share of the vote. Here is an example of what might happen in one constituency:

The Conservatives won in 1959 by a majority of 6%. In 1964, if five out of every 100 of the Conservatives’ supporters vote Labour, the result could be a win for Labour by 4%, equal to a swing of 5%. Thus a national swing of 5% to one party puts in danger all seats held by majorities of under 10%.

Where there is a third party the picture is more complicated. Swing, it must be remembered, is only a crude measure of the net change between the two biggest parties—in calculating it the other parties have to be ignored. Here is an example:

This shows a swing to the Conservatives of 2%. Both Conservatives and Labour lost votes but Labour lost more. To get the swing to the Conservatives, halve the difference (4%) and you get 2% (see Section 2).

PERCENTAGE SHARE OF THE VOTE Constituencies vary greatly in number of electors and in the proportion of electors actually voting. Therefore a direct comparison between changes in majority (‘X’s fell by 5,000 while Y’s only fell by 2,000′) can be very misleading. Much more intelligible contrasts can be made if all votes are thought of as percentages of the total vote cast so that we can say ‘the Labour share of the vote rose by 3% in Barsetshire but fell by 1% in neighbouring Blanktown.’

ELECTORATE This is, almost, the same as the adult population: nearly 37-million. Electoral registers were compiled in every constituency on October 10, 1963, and every British citizen over twenty-one by June 1964 is technically entitled to vote. Errors in the register may affect 3% or 4% of the population: a further 12% have moved house in the last year and can only vote by post or by returning to their old polling district.

THE BIAS IN THE ELECTORAL SYSTEM The electoral system is slightly biased in favour of the Conservative party — not deliberately but because the population happens to be distributed in a way that produces extreme concentrations of Labour strength in some areas so that Labour ‘wastes’ more votes than the Conservatives in piling up huge majorities. To win a majority in Parliament the Conservatives have hitherto needed about 1½% less of the national vote than the Labour party.

2: The swing and what it means in votes

The number of seats won by a major party is fairly exactly related to the proportion of the vote which it wins. If the number of seats won by Liberals and minor parties does not change substantially the following table should give a fair guide of how the 1964 Parliament will differ from the 1959 Parliament. (In 1959 Conservative’s won 49.4% of the vote and 365 seats; Labour 43.6% of the vote and 258 seats — a Conservative majority over Labour of 107).

If the swing in 1964 is:

3: Seats to watch in the early results

Among the results expected by midnight on Thursday, Labour must win at least six of the following seats if they are to form the next Government. The Conservatives must hold some of them if they are to stay in power.

If the Conservatives were to win any seats from Labour in the first results these are the likeliest possibilities:

* (1963 By-Election)

The Liberals will face two tests in the early results:

* (The Conservatives did not stand here in 1959 but are standing now)

4: Forecasting the winner

Around 10 o’clock next Thursday evening the first constituency will give its verdict in the 1964 General Election. Instantly the figures will be computed and analysed and everyone will start guessing what the final majority will be.

The TV and radio commentators will say: ‘The —- party will win with a majority of —- if the whole country behaves like Billericay (or Cheltenham, or Salford, or whoever wins the counting race).’ They will hastily add ‘but we can’t be certain that the country is behaving like this until we’ve had a few more results.’ The commentator who is too precise too early may look a bit silly before the night is over. After the experience of 1955, partisans may think it wise to wait a while before starting their celebrations — or drowning their sorrows.

How soon will it, in fact, be clear who has won? This naturally depends on how close the outcome is going to be.

If, in the early results, the swing from 1959 is between 2½% and 4½% to Labour, the tension will last quite a long time.

But, if the swing is outside those margins, the commentators will be committing themselves before very many results are in. Just how many will also depend on how much the swing varies between constituencies.

In the 1950s, in the great majority of constituencies, the swing was surprisingly close to the national average. If you took a dozen seats at random, their result would mirror the national result. Britain is a united, not to say a uniform, nation politically.

While the swing in the constituencies that report early will probably mirror the swing in the rest of the country, the actual party strength may be a bit misleading. Borough constituencies tend to count the votes quicker than county constituencies and Labour is stronger in the towns. Therefore Labour is likely to get more seats in the early results than in the later ones. In the very close elections of 1950 and 1951, Labour was 50 to 60 seats ahead on the results declared overnight. But by the early afternoon of Friday the Conservatives had pulled level as the county returns came in.

If the Labour party is going to win the 1964 election, it will have to lie clearly in the lead by the time 100 results are in. And those 100 results should be in by midnight on Thursday.

The main interest in the election naturally lies in knowing who has won and by how much. But there will also be the fascinating question: Why? Why is it turning out like this? Is it the Liberal vote? Or the new towns? Is there any sign of people abstaining from voting? Is Scotland behaving like London? A host of such questions are stirred up by the results.

Sometimes final answers may have to wait for weeks — or for ever. But many can be answered within minutes. Computers and experienced statisticians will be working for BBC-tv and Radio through the night. By the time each result is broadcast, the computers (National Elliott 803 for TV and IBM 7094 for radio) will have worked out swing and the turnout. They will keep a running tally of all the votes cast and calculate up-to-date percentages for each party.

They will analyse the results in each big city and each region and they will check whether rural or suburban or other types of constituency are out of line with the rest of the country. A British election, however, presents, in computer terms, a very simple problem; the election results programme must not, therefore, be seen as a great test of the studio computers. They will merely provide accurate information rather more quickly and more exhaustively than slide rules and adding machines. However, with subtle analysis, the fuller data from the computer will make it possible to give more exact forecasts rather earlier than ever before and at the same time to tell you what lies behind the figures.

5: Three golden rules

1. The crucial swing to Labour is 3½%. If the swing in the early results is much over 4%, the Labour party is heading for victory. If the swing is much under 3%, the Conservatives are home again.
2. Labour need at least to gain 5 Conservative seats in the first 100 results to have a good chance of winning.
3. The more the swing varies in different parts of the country, the longer it will be before anyone can go nap on the final majority.

Covering the Election: tonight and tomorrow

The BBC’s team for the most complex combined operation in its history includes television and radio’s most experienced commentators and reporters. They will provide you with an up-to-the-minute and comprehensive service of election results together with expert comment and analysis, vivid reports, and telling interviews from all over the country

The post The General Election appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

John Lennon

John Lennon, rhythm guitar. Tall, slim, broad-shouldered. Hair brown, eyes brown. A genuinely talented humorist who has had his written ramblings published in newspapers. He recalls singing “The Happy Wanderer” every day for a month to an English master at school — “he left, for reasons unknown”.

Later he was suspended from school for eating chocolate in class. He celebrated by going to the pictures. He says: “There nearly wasn’t a John Winston Lennon. As a kid, I was shot at once for stealing apples. Also I nearly fell off while riding on the bumpers of a Liverpool tram…”

John’s mother is dead now but she originally taught him to play banjo. He lives with “an aunt called Mimi”. He has two step-sisters, Julia and Jacqueline. And he studied art (enthusiastically) and maths and science (hopelessly) at Dovedale Primary School, Quarrybank Grammar School, then Liverpool College of Art.

He dug back into memory-land. “Once, Paul McCartney and I played Reading as the Nurk Twins. Went down a bomb, I recall. And once, Ringo and I drove his first car round together — really, with both of us at the wheel at the same time! I’m not really a good driver. And there was the time when George Harrison, who was already at another school, came along to Quarrybank for a joke and enrolled for art GCE.”

On stage, John is dominant. He stands determinedly, relaxed yet dynamic. In Glasgow, a drunken lad climbed on stage and just tottered there, watching John sing. John was unmoved….

“I suppose I always was a big spender, even before I had much money to spend,” John admits. “Clothes are my pet extravagance. I go for suede, leather, cord or denims. If I went into business one day, I think I’d set up a string of clothes shops — good ones, dealing in the best gear.

“This business lets me meet a lot of interesting people. I like that. And I go for the money, too. We’re gradually meeting all the names in the business — my own best friends are the other Beatles, Gerry Marsden and the Shadows.”

Musically, John lines up with the general Beatle tastes. He talks about Little Richard, Chuck Jackson, Chuck Berry, Mary Wells. The groups for him: the Miracles, Shirelies, Chiffons, Marvelettes, with Earl Bostic a surprisingly favourite instrumentalist.

“I’d like to write a stage musical one day—and, of course, keep on getting hit songs for us and for other groups. But the big musical: that would be a real challenge.”

To illustrate John’s style of writing, let him explain how the group got its name. “Why Beatles? Ugh, Beatles! How did the name arrive? So I will tell you. It came in a vision – a man on a flaming pie and said unto them ‘From this day you are Beatles with an “A”.’ Thank you, Mister Man, they said, thanking him.”

John is perhaps the best all-rounder in the group. He writes poetry, is a good painter, has collaborated on plays with Paul. He admits: “My main ambition is to be rich and famous. That’s all.”

He was 20 when he started in show business and is now 5 ft. 11 in. tall, weighing 11 stone 5 lb. The dark clothes he invariably wears do not really match his ever-changing personality. He admits he is not very happy with “stupid people” — meaning people who lag behind, thought-wise.

John was born on October 9, 1940.

Ringo Starr

Ringo Starr, drummer. Smallest member of the group, last to join, blue-eyed, brown-haired—and nursing an ambition to play everything on drums with either right or left hand.

Educated at Saint Silas School, Dingle Vale Secondary Modern, then Riversdale Technical, showing plenty of talent in handicrafts but little in maths or English. Recalls: “I used to get money for school meals, but used it on a loaf, fourpennyworth of chips and five Woodbines!”

The man who lays down that urgent Beatles’ beat is mad on motor-racing. “I’d love to own an Alfa-Romeo and take it up seriously. Maybe I’ll never make it.” His parents, Elsie and Harry Starkey, really wanted their son to take up ladies’ hairdressing. He says: “I’d go into that line now, if I got the money together. Or maybe I’d take up a car hire business.”

He is appreciative of all his parents did for him. “They think we are doing great,” he says. “They love watching us work. I’ll always be grateful because they bought me my first drum kit. Our success means that, at last, my mother doesn’t have to go out to work—she’s worked all her life.’

Ringo, real-name Richard, got his unusual name because of his habit of wearing at least a couple of rings on each hand. “I dig fashions,” he said. “I spend mostly on good suits, with odd styles. I also like casual corduroy — but I can’t stand baggy trousers or double-breasted suits.”

While other Beatles said they liked jelly-babies, Ringo named whisky as his favourite drink. The fans obliged with bottles of hooch. Says Ringo: “I’ve had a few marriage proposals through the post. They’re difficult to answer without being hurtful. I date when I can. My favourite girls? Ah — around 5 ft. 5 in. tall, good figure, That’s all, just as long as they’re intelligent. Yes, I’d like to try married life, but I suppose it’s difficult just to TRY it!”

Ringo drummed out an incessant rhythm with his finger-tips. “We’ve had some some old times, the Beatles,” he said. “Actually my worst moment was when we did our first stage show at the local Liverpool Empire. Back went those curtains — and there was I, still setting up my drum kit!

“Music is now my life — and I feel happier than at any time. I think John and Paul are fantastic composers — right up there in the Gerry Goffin-Carole King class. My own personal tastes go to genuine R and B or C and W….

“I collect records by stars like Chuck Jackson, Brook Benton, Della Reese, or Patsy Cline. Among the groups, the Shirelles. They have that fab feeling for their music. Really, that’s my only way of relaxing — either listening to records or watching television.”

Stardom has meant that Ringo is at last able to feel independent. “Sure the work ties us down a lot, but at least if I’m free I can go wherever I like without having to count the cost.

“I have these strange likes and dislikes. Can’t stand Donald Duck, for instance. Or onions. But fast cars, even just looking at them, I do like. And my favourite food is still steak and chips.”

Ringo was originally with the Darktown Skiffle Group, then with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. He has experience, style and ambition.

Ringo was born on July 7, 1940.

Paul McCartney

Paul McCartney, bass guitar. Left-handed and used to find himself genuinely writing back to front. He has written more than 100 songs with John Lennon and also plays drums, piano and banjo. And he says, in all seriousness, that he would like to become “a tramp” if he couldn’t carry on in music.

He remembers going on a hitch-hiking tour with George Harrison, a school-mate in the pre-Beatle days. “We didn’t eat for 28 hours once. We used to cook tins of spaghetti on a primus stove by the road-side. We slept on the beach in Taunton and in the football ground stand in Wales.

“Success now is nice. I can buy food and clothes — spend money. Clothes is a hobby. I like high-collared shirts, tight trousers, black socks, suits in leather and suede. Can’t stand coloured socks, baggy trousers, cutaway collars.”

Paul is 5 ft. 11 in. tall, with dark brown hair and hazel eyes. He weighs 11 stone. At Liverpool Institute High School he’did well in English literature, moderately well at other things but very badly in geography and maths. His geography has improved with all the Beatle travelling.

Musically, he leans towards R and B and modern jazz. He’ll listen for hours to American artistes like Chuck Jackson, the Miracles, Little Richard, Ketty Lester, Dinah Washington and Raelets’ member Margie Hendrickson. Of music, he says: “My mum is dead now, but my father has always helped. He used to run his own jazz band, back in the 1920s, so he knows a bit about the business. Though some of our material is a bit way out for a razzamatazz chap like him.

“I enjoy writing songs and sometimes wish I had more time to give to it. Goffin and King, the Americans, are fine writers. I also like Luther Dixon and Leonard Bernstein. Song-writing AND bird-watching — they’re my fave off-duty hobbies. Oh, yes — and sleeping. We just don’t seem to get any sleep these days….”

Paul gets his fair share of fan-mail, mostly from girls, tries to answer most of them. He says of the girls he dates: “I like them to have long hair, be sensible yet have a sense of humour and, of course, it’s important that they like music. I like to go with a girl to a cinema or a theatre. Something quiet and relaxing. Yes, I think I’d like to settle down one day … buy a house and all that.

“I’m a film fan. I often think we ought to write a film for ourselves so that we could be sure that all the Beatles had a fair crack of the whip. That’s one trouble—making sure that each of us gets the same prominence as the others. We ARE a team. Each one is a quarter of the whole.”

Paul thought about the future. He would be interested in investing, one day, in his brother’s hairdressing business. But as the youngest in the group, he finds the future that bit harder to think about.

He’d like a car. “Anything in the classic mould would suit me. But anything else would be accepted with good will!” The gag is never far away when Paul chats about anything. He admits, though, that he is not a very good driver.

His best friends are the other three Beatles and Gerry Marsden, of the Pacemakers. His most off-beat musical memory is playing, with George and John, while a strip-tease girl shed her clothes in Liverpool.

Paul’s birthday is June 18.

George Harrison

George Harrison, lead guitar. Nearly six feet tall, brown-haired, browneyed. Debonair—though that’s not the word used by his teachers at Liverpool Institute High School to describe him when he set new fashions by adapting his school uniform to include skin-tight trousers, coloured waistcoat and suede shoes. “Diabolical” was THEIR word.

Said George: “We had fab end-of-term sessions at school. Paul McCartney and I, Les Chadwick of the Pacemakers, plus two of the San Remo Four. We swung … but we didn’t realise we’d all end up as professionals.”

George first met Paul on the bus home from school, some eight years ago. John Lennon was “encountered” in the fish-and-chip shop by the school. Ringo — “he looked so moody, but was quite different when I got to know him properly” — was first met in the Kaiserkeller Club in Hamburg.

At school, George was hopeless at maths and history but promising at art. He lost his interest in sports in his mid-teens but once was a useful athlete.

A family man is George — travelling permitting. His parents, Harold and Louise Harrison, encouraged him in his music simply by not complaining at the noise he made. But he had a few brushes with sister Louise and brothers Harry and Peter.

Stardom is exciting, admits George. He can indulge more in clothes and buy records when he likes. His favourites range from Little Richard to Eartha Kitt, but Chet Atkins and Duane Eddy are guitarists he admires.

“Dating? Whenever I can. I like girls but there’s nobody special. Blondes appeal to me — especially small girls who have a sense of humour and can laugh when I’m happy and be serious when I’m sad. I’ll get married one day … but right now the domestic scene doesn’t appeal.”

He gets a stack of fan-mail, often accompanied by presents of toys, or teddy bears, or jelly-babies. He reads all the letters, tries to answer each one when he can get the time.

George enjoys driving. Says he is a good driver but wonders whether other motorists would agree! He hates having his hair-cut, not so much for the waste of time but for the newly-shorn look he gets. He loves listening to well-played Spanish guitar or good Country ‘n’ Western music — “one day, I hope, I’ll design a brand-new type of guitar”, he says.

At 10 stone 4 lb., George is slender for his height. But he tucks away plenty of pork and lamb, and fresh cream and pears. He has occasional “fry-ups” at home—bacon, eggs, omelettes.

He relaxes easily, either strumming on his guitar or listening to records.

Self-taught on guitar, drums and piano, George finds music comes fairly easily to him. He’s the second youngest in the group—Paul is just four months “less aged”—and yet he commands attention when the boys talk over arrangements and ideas. Actually George started in show business at the age of 17, earlier than any of the other Beatles.

George pays high tributes to the group’s manager Brian Epstein and to recording manager George Martin. “That thrill of having our first disc a hit within two days of release,” says George, “was positively fantastic.” He shakes his head in wonderment and the hair flops forward over his forehead.

“I wanted my parents to be proud of me. I think they are, now,” he said.

George’s birthday: February 25.

The post Meet the Beatles appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

★

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.

28 April 1964
“Tuesday Term”
Men and Money ‘A Question of Confidence’

This programme took us into the world of banking and as the main title suggests, it is a world largely inhabited by men. They lived up well to the stereotype of older, stuffy men in suits and bowler hats. There were interviews with several bankers but what really interested me was the explanation of how cheques are cleared. There is a floor full of women sorting through hundreds of cheques, many for vast amounts, even by today’s standards. These must be authorised by a set time as there is only a very limited amount of time for communications. It all seemed absolutely extraordinary how such a vast operation could be organised so well in a pre-digital age.

This programme has become a wonderful snapshot of a time when banking had remained the same for decades. Soon there would be cash machines appearing and within a few decades computers would usher in huge changes for how banks operated day-to-day. The introduction of credit and debit cards contributed to the decline of personal cheques.

25 July 1964
Horizon ‘Strangeness Minus Three’

I was surprised by just how much I enjoyed a documentary on theoretical physics. Professor Brian Cox has done his best to show me the wonders of the universe, but this Horizon documentary was still a fairly mentally taxing hour as I summoned up Mr Johnson’s Physics classroom in my mind’s eye and did my best to remember everything, or even just anything, he’d ever taught me about atoms.

First, we saw some awesome titles with funky electronic-type music and geometric shapes. I was impressed. We got straight into the documentary – there is no presenter introducing what’s going on and the show just cracks on with it.

I’m curious just how much knowledge the general population had about atoms as we pretty much jump straight in to breaking them up. My simple physics is that the world is made up of elements like hydrogen, magnesium, silver – all those things on the Periodic Table. Elements are made up of different types of atoms, which are made up of protons and neutrons. These two form the nucleus of an atom, which have electrons going round them.

In this programme, we look at the particles that make up protons and neutrons. Particles disintegrate into other particles, and each of these stages are called ‘strangeness’. If protons and neutrons are strangeness 0, then whatever disintegrates into them is strangeness -1, whatever disintegrates into strangeness -1 is called strangeness -2, and so on.

This is all explained in much more detail by a Bronx fellow, Richard Feynman, and I enjoyed his voice and demeanour – it was like having Tony Curtis as a Science teacher. He wasn’t the world’s best presenter though as he spent quite a lot of time looking down at his feet and I have the feeling he may have been glancing at notes on a desk too, which is understandable as he had a lot to explain and is a physicist, not a presenter. Feynman told us that based on the interaction of other particles, physicists knew that a particle must exist that could only disintegrate in three steps before it got to neutron and proton, therefore it was described as strangeness -3.

One of the people hunting who had predicted this particle was Murray Gell-Man, who is interviewed next to his pool by a very young-looking man called David Lutyens. I just can’t imagine a British scientist chatting away to a journalist in such a laid-back. When asked how he gets on with other scientists, Gell-Man replies, “We don’t get mad at each other at all but we scream and yell.”

The other scientist involved in the ‘strangeness’ theory was Yuval Ne’eman, who had previously been a Colonel in the Israeli army. He ended up in theoretical physics “because of London traffic” – he had been based at King’s College and a course at Imperial College was nearer. He wore a silky-looking striped and dotted tie for the interview, which I felt was a brave choice.

Next to be interviewed was a young fellow, Nicholas Samios, at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, who explained how a proton accelerator works. It fires atoms at each other so that they smash together. Photos are taken at the same time and by studying these, scientists can detect a particle’s rate of decay. We see some of the photos and I think the patterns, which the scientists were trying to predict, looks fantastic. He was working on the search for strangeness -3 and around 100,000 photos were taken altogether before they finally found what they were looking for on photo number 97,025. I loved what Samios had to say about what was going through his mind: “At this moment, we few on this face of this Earth, we are the only ones who know that this particle, this omega that goes this short distance, this particle exists. Other people may think they know, Gell-Man probably thought he knew, but he didn’t know. We knew.” How extraordinary that is when you think about such discoveries like he did – to be the only people in history at that moment to know something existed.

At the end, we return to Feynman, who is relaxing in his garden armchair and discussing what propels him to carry on. Each discovery gives him “excitement” as “we have a wonderful new view of nature, we see the ingenuity […] of nature herself”. I loved hearing someone speak so beautifully about physics. He presents his passion so well and Feynman believes he is living in a magnificent time for discoveries, going as far to say, “we live in a heroic age.”

22 August 1964
Match of the Day ‘Liverpool vs. Arsenal’

Even if you aren’t a football fan, it would be difficult to avoid being aware of Match of the Day. After using the same title for their Wimbledon coverage earlier in the summer, the first football-focussed Match of the Day series began with the start of the 1964/65 season in August. Its popularity ensured it wouldn’t be long before it was bumped up to BBC-1.

This wasn’t the BBC’s first foray into Football League coverage; they had been broadcasting brief clips in their Sports Special and Saturday Sport programmes for several years, and the synopsis for both had described them as reporting on the ‘match of the day’. However, while television had been able to provide coverage of big events like the FA Cup and international matches, negotiations with the League had proved tricky. ITV had attempted a regular live football programme in 1960 called The Big Game and it ended disastrously. While they had made agreements with the Football League, no one had thought to consult the clubs themselves and one by one they, excuse the pun, kicked off. The League and the clubs remained concerned that broadcasting games would affect match attendances.

The original Match of the Day did exactly what it said on the tin, showing highlights of a single match from earlier in the day. Arranging the filming for each weekend must have taken some organisation, so they could only ever guess and hope that the one match chosen that day would be a good one. That ‘match of the day’ claim was always going to be subjective. However, they did in fact manage to pick a corker for this first edition.

We’re at Liverpool’s home ground, Anfield, although no one in that part of the world would have seen the programme as BBC-2 hadn’t reached there yet. Liverpool were the previous season’s champions but this could hardly have been seen as a clash of titans, with Arsenal having finished eighth. Nonetheless, I found it a gripping game with plenty going on. One of the commentators is Kenneth Wolstenholme, whose words would later become known by most of England due to his oft-quoted 1966 World Cup Final commentary.

Almost the entire 55-minute programme consists of match time as there is no studio analysis and barely anything post-game. To my eyes, the editing is good overall and I found it hard to spot. There is no clock in the top corner and it seemed simply like a fast-paced game. Added to the enjoyment of this is Wolstenholme’s commentary. He’s clearly really enjoying himself and is thrilled to be witnessing such an exciting fixture. His descriptions of it go from “splendid” and “electrifying” to ending on “well I’d call it the match of the century, I don’t know about match of the day”.

I’m far from a huge football fan but it’s interesting to see just how much the sport has changed and television has certainly contributed to some of that. The kits are almost plain with a number on the back and while Liverpool have an oval version of their Liver Bird emblem, Arsenal have yet to add a club badge to the front of their kit. There is no sponsorship and nor did I spot any advertising around the stadium. The crowd can be seen to move, surging around in the standing areas. Children are right at the front, keen faces peering over the barriers. Around the very edge of the pitch, photographers lie on their stomachs and I’m sure there must have been some broken noses sacrificed for such a close, crucial picture. While no doubt helped by the editing, I like how well the game seemed to flow. I feel a bore for having to state it but there are no BAFTA-winning dives, no rolling around and no exaggerated pleas or abuse of the ref on the edge of the penalty box. The players seem altogether keen to get on with the game with throw-ins and free kicks all taken rather swiftly.

An amusing interlude was the appearance of a black cat shooting around the pitch. It appeared suddenly and halted play, with quick-thinking camera operators managing to follow it. Eventually it disappeared off the pitch, hopefully to be petted and given a saucer of something nice.

17 September 1964
Time Out ‘The Guns of James Bond’

Time Out looked at ‘the world of leisure’ and in BBC-2’s first year the programme looked at a range of activities. Polo, ballet, mountain climbing and judo are among those viewers may already have been familiar with but the programme also had more specialist episodes, with titles like ‘the Witches of Britain’, ‘a Coal Miner’s Day Out’, and ‘The House-Savers’ – about people who try to save historic houses from demolition.

This episode includes a look at the world of James Bond. I’ve always been a fan of 007 so this was quite exciting. Having read the Bond books, Geoffrey Boothroyd wrote to their author, Ian Fleming, advising him that Bond really should carry a better gun than his old Beretta. Fleming took Boothroyd’s advice and wrote him into the series as Major Boothroyd, better known as Q, who went on to become the gadget-master of the films.

There have been three James Bond films by this point, with the latest, Goldfinger, being released on the very day this episode goes out. Both the books and the films had become extremely popular so anything Bond-related was likely to get a few extra viewers tuning in.

In this feature, Boothroyd demonstrates a range of handguns, talking us through their pros and cons. Bond originally carried a small Beretta but Boothroyd favours a Colt 45 Magnum. The latter would have been familiar to 1964 audiences as it was the sort of gun often used by cowboys in Westerns, which were very popular at the time. It’s a big gun though so it’s a bit too conspicuous for 007. Boothroyd also demonstrates the chamois leather shoulder holster that Fleming had had Bond using. It’s clear why Boothroyd thought Bond would end up dead if he carried on with it – it easily catches on the gun when he tries to draw.

The highlight of the feature for me was Boothroyd’s demonstration of the guns with tomato cans. He fires a Beretta and a tiny hole appears in the can – barely anything. I’m sure it would smart but a single bullet is unlikely to seriously wound anyone unless it precisely hits a really vital spot. Next is the Walter PPK – the gun Boothroyd ultimately recommended for Bond. It makes a reasonably-sized hole in the can and while slightly bigger than the Beretta, it is still small enough to be concealed without ruining the line of a suit. Finally, the Magnum destroys half the can, with the contents rapidly pouring out. You wouldn’t last long once one of those had gone through you.

30 September 1964
Marriage Today ‘An Intimate Union’

The programme’s name gives away what it will be about and the show consists of discussions and interviews. In this episode sex and babies get most of the coverage.

The narration tells us that sex is talked about more than ever, which took me back a bit. Maybe among people, young people, but I wouldn’t have expected it so much in public at that time; it’s something I associate with the latter half of the decade. Not everyone is happy about this open state of affairs, with one councillor quoted as describing sex as “a disgusting necessity”. Specifically, what makes more people uncomfortable is discussion of premarital sex. A few younger people give vox-pop comments that provides a balanced view. One looks more serious than the rest and believes most people still know little about sex, but unfortunately he isn’t more specific. Does he mean the mechanics of it all? VD? Contraception? It’s a bit wide open.

Men are said to be becoming more involved in bringing up children, although this isn’t really backed up with one of the couples the programme focuses on, who talk us through the course of their marriage. They married while the husband was still studying as an engineer and after their first child adopted another two before unexpectedly having another biological child. Husband seemed very uncertain about children, saying that “I knew my wife liked children but as to whether I did or not, that wasn’t terribly clear to me.” It comes across as though he did what was expected – getting married and then trying for a baby. At one point they travelled to Nigeria for his work and barely saw each other. While the wife says she likes other people to make decisions, it sounds as though it was her who put her foot down to say she was fed up of this arrangement.

The world may have been moving forward but in 1964 three blokes were invited on television to discuss sex, in a conversation that soon drifted on to women’s enjoyment of sex. It seems mind-blowing that anyone ever thought this was alright, but even when a woman joins them for another discussion later in the programme, the talk seems very academic. It definitely appears that half their knowledge has come from textbooks written decades ago.

I was surprised to see them discussing something like women’s enjoyment of sex, which felt a bit beyond what I would have expected of 1964 television, but I was intrigued by several of the topics brought up – lust vs. love, sexual desire, affairs, the lack of accurate information on sex available. If there was more discussion than ever on sex, it seems to me that it could only be a good thing and perhaps lead to better health and happiness.

16 December 1964
The Likely Lads ‘Entente Cordial’

I know the lads from when they are a little older in The Likely Lads sequel, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, but I’ve always fancied getting to know them in their younger days. In this first episode, Terry and Bob have just got back from a holiday abroad. Foreign holidays were still quite unusual for most people and the two working class Newcastle boys have gone into it rather differently. While Bob spent the week eating paella and lusting after a French woman, Terry’s mistrust of anything foreign let him happily live on egg and chips while chatting up a variety of English ladies. Bob tried to leave his address at the French woman’s hotel but as he was too drunk to write, Terry wrote his own down instead. Surprisingly, she gets in touch and the lads arrange to meet up with her and her friend. Except it turns out she isn’t French – she’s Welsh.

As two young single blokes they seem to be doing well enough. They work together in an electrical factory and the trip abroad is evidence that they must be earning good wages. They both live at home and are free to spend most of their money on beer, dances and the opposite sex. Taking the lads to both be in their early twenties, they are among the first young men for several generations that haven’t had to go to war or complete National Service. At a time when most people got married by the age of 23 or 24, the lads are living remarkably carefree lives compared to those just a few years older than them.

It’s wonderful that already in this first episode you can see the sort of men the lads will later morph into. Bob is open to new things with slightly higher aspirations than Terry, and he is arguably the more gentlemanly of the two. Terry’s mistrust of anything outside Newcastle’s city boundaries will only become more vehement, even after visiting far flung corners with the army. While this doesn’t paint the best picture of Terry, in the later series he was always my favourite character as I am sympathetic to his cynical nature. There’s a lot of rot in the world but he can at least keep trust in Newcastle United, brown ale and, of course, Bob.

10 February 1965
Enquiry ‘Portrait of a GP’

Enquiry was touted as reporting on the ‘major issues of the day’ and this edition follows and interviews one GP in the course of his duties. Rather strangely, the doctor interviewed isn’t actually named at all during the programme. I was partly intrigued by the reporter, a young David Dimbleby, but he’s here in voice only unfortunately.

The doctor is very open about what he believes is going wrong in the National Health Service, which was less than 20 years old. While 1,700 doctors were produced each year in Britain, about 400 to 500 doctors had been emigrating every year since 1951. A lot of doctors had opposed the introduction of the NHS as they didn’t want to be employed by the government and worried it would limit their independence, so this can be put down to some of the early emigration.

The Enquiry GP makes it clear that workload, pay, and interference with family life were major downsides. He can see around 100 patients some days, giving him three and a quarter minutes with each of them. He makes £6,000 [£116,000 in 2019, allowing for inflation] a year, being left with £2,300 [£44,500] pre-tax after the practice costs have been taken out. Adjusted for 2018, that’s a decent amount of money and possibly more than the average GP makes today [Partners in practice make an average of £103,000pa, those employed directly by the primary healthcare trusts get between £53,781 and £81,158 – Ed]. However, he doesn’t believe it’s enough recompense for the work most GPs do.

He articulates his frustrations well throughout the programme. A nurse works in his practice as an assistant/receptionist and he has to pay her out of his own pocket. He describes her as a “tremendous asset” and that’s clear from the list of things she does, which includes injections, wound dressings, and home visits for some routine nursing procedures. I was amused and amazed that he was so open in criticising some of his patients: “There are a number of patients whose nuisance value greatly exceeds their numbers. They’ve been promised a free, personal health service when they can call upon their doctor without any let or hindrance, any time of the day or night. They pay their stamp for it and they mistakenly believe that all the money on the stamp goes straight to their general practitioner.”

It seems to really pain him that his work affects his home life so much. His wife steps in to answer calls when he’s on his rounds and “will deal with, sometimes, appalling casualties which arrive at one’s front door”, all for no pay. They have edited the programme well for this point as we see him sitting at the family dinner table as his voiceover says, “there’s no time mend the children’s toys,” and then the phone rings.

Watching today is all the more extraordinary because the country seems to be having the same discussions about the NHS’s problems in the present. Having risen by a third over the previous two decades, in the late 1950s the government decided to cut the numbers of trainee doctors, fearing a surplus. Yet the shortages were soon evident and by 1971 nearly a third of all doctors had been initially trained overseas.

I wish we had been given the doctor’s name because I would love to know what happened to him. This is such an intriguing snapshot of a single person’s experience in a job at that time. The programme ends with him contemplating the possibility of looking for a change within the next few years, yet he doesn’t really want to as it’s “the only thing I have ever wanted to do […] I like the people I look after but I have responsibilities to my family.”

The post Back in time for TV: BBC-2 appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

On Radio Luxembourg of the time, the evening was divided into 15-minute programmes, each one associated with a sponsor and, generally, a single record label. The Wrigley’s programme was fifteen minutes of Pye records, and this jingle was used during the show.

On Big L, shows were unsponsored and a mix of discs from various labels was played, with spot advertising in-between. This Radio Luxembourg jingle became a 30 second spot advert on Radio London.

Incidentally, Teddy Johnson’s other claim to fame was that he had a popular programme on Radio Luxembourg, and was even resident in the Grand Duchy in the early 1950s.

The post Juicy Fruit adds to your fun! appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

Yes, we loved the little ‘Ecko’ radio set that my father forked out around 25 guineas for and even the HMV record player that he played all his ‘classicals’ on, but life in the 3rd form in my personal 1964 was becoming unbearable for me as probably the only boy in class that went home to Mrs Dale’s Diary (already now changed to The Dales), rather than The Five O’clock Club and Stubby Kay, Muriel Young, Ollie Beak and Fred Barker or Eamonn Andrews and Crackerjack.

Most of my television viewing up until 1964 then was courtesy of my pals and I owe them (or at least their long suffering parents) a debt of gratitude for introducing me to Muffin the Mule (don’t, please…), The Lone Ranger, Popeye, I Love Lucy, Wagon Train, Take Your Pick and Blue Peter (there was much more of course). The gratitude extends even more to suddenly becoming aware of separate TV companies forming part of the great ITV network – or ‘the ITA’ as we called it – with their memorable jingles and animated ‘idents’ (even early Granada had an ident that silently fluttered the letters from left to right to make the word ‘Granada’ above that northward-rising pointing arrow). Those that might have read my pieces elsewhere will know that I still get embarrassingly excited over three triangles forming into one and the ching-ching-chinging letters A, B and C. Such was (and is) the world of the boomer generation.

So it was with some trepidation at the age of 12-going-on-13 that I wrote a letter to our nearest branch of Rentaset (later, part of Radio Rentals) asking for a ‘brochure’ on the latest sets they were offering. I think I signed it in my father’s name and soon, Dad was persuaded that TV was probably at last past the J L Baird 30-line stage and had more or less been ‘perfected’ and he felt able to wrench himself out of the Victorian age and embrace the new media, if only for the ‘serious’ stuff like classical drama, Shakespeare and Dickens. In truth, and with some guilty reflection in my dotage, I suspect the cost of the enterprise also had a part in the delay of television coming to the Singleton household.

So the grand day of change arrived we strained our necks as we watched the man strap the aerial – probably mistakenly – to the furthest chimney stack from the lounge window, so the co-axial cable stretched right across the roof before eventually being threaded through the drilled hole in the window frame.

When our television set arrived, there were at first, some restrictions. Sunday was supposed to be a day of rest, so it wasn’t until around tea time when the traditional ‘Dickens-or-similar’ slot aired did the TV set really get warm, although later, the parental restrictions began to be lifted as they themselves became more enthusiastic. Censorship was still enforced however at other times – Wednesday Plays particularly suffered and Till Death Us Do Part did too, (Mum: “That awful man!”).

Limited to two TV channels, it was just thirteen days after my thirteenth birthday when BBC-2 began transmissions (it was a shaky start though) in this Great Year of Change but us “oop north” had to wait until 1965 before the Winter Hill transmitter started radiating those six hundred and twenty five lines. “It’ll be just like a photograph” the Radio Rentals man announced (over-egging the reality somewhat) when he came to add the UHF tuner to the dual standard ready set we had already swapped to in the excitement of the build up to the second BBC channel as it spread rather slowly across the UK. And that unusual aerial heralded to all neighbours that we “had” BBC-2.

There was something rather avant-garde about the channel, and it made much of the “625” tag… (Jazz 625, Theatre 625) and its prime remit was to promote knowledge building and accentuate new comedy, drama and the arts. One early parentally-approved drama was The Forsyte Saga with such names as Kenneth More, Nyree Dawn Porter and Eric Porter in the main roles of Galsworthy’s Forsyte novels. It was the last major drama made by the BBC in black and white and the family became firm viewers.

So 1964 was becoming a year that changed everything in more ways than one. The reason I always get the ‘what year were the Tokyo Olympics?’ question right is because of television. The TV coverage for me was the start of something exciting because Telstar had been launched (Telstar 1 in 1963 and Telstar 2 in 1964) and this meant pictures could be beamed across the world (although it wasn’t until the Synchro 3 satellite that geo-synchronous coverage became the norm). Names such as Mary Rand, Lynn Davies, Robbie Brightwell and Ann Packer stick in my mind even today.

But there other television milestones in the year – and what a start it was when Top of The Pops first burst on to the screens. It was to continue for 42 years, along with Christmas Day specials. The show became part of British pop culture and there are still “decade” repeats, although any later ‘disgraced’ personalities are wiped from existence. For me though, Associated-Rediffusion’s more anarchic Ready, Steady, Go! already on air for four months as 1964 dawned, was much more of a turning point in pop culture as it became more established on our TV screens and reflected more the mood of the day.

The Beatles went to America and appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show (three times in fact) and took the States by storm. Ed Sullivan was a big name and his CBS show had already a 16 year history so this was something of a British coup and America became fascinated by the English music scene and what later became to be known as the British Invasion.

Granada’s socio-economic study Seven Up! was first broadcast in May in the World in Action strand and has been revisited every seven years since. I remember the first one – and I’ll be watching again with fascination in 2019 when 63 Up! airs, if only to see who’s left…

The short-lived Not So Much a Programme… More a Way of Life launched in November and Ned Sherrin continued the satirical path laid down by That Was The Week That Was, which was removed from the schedules the previous year due to the impending general election. Not as sharp as TW3, it didn’t last long and was followed in 1965 with BBC 3, hosted by Robert Robinson.

And although Granadalanders weren’t aware until later on, ATV’s Crossroads opened for business (“Crossroads Motel. Can I help you?”). Whether or not this was a highlight of 1964 is a debate but it deserves a mention – as does the dubious birth of a new newspaper, The Sun.

But 1964 wasn’t all about television. A cultural shift was in the air and at Easter, we became aware that we could twiddle our medium wave radio sets to one-nine-nine and listen to something called Radio Caroline. However, it wasn’t until Caroline North anchored itself off the Isle of Man that I really became aware of the power of change that the pirate radio stations were making. No longer were we limited to the BBC Light Programme or even Radio Luxembourg (which was subject to some dreadful reception) we were able to listen to pop music presented in a way that captured the ‘1964 shift’.

News today is fed to us round the clock – but for us early teens in 1964, we were limited to fairly short news bulletins on television. But nevertheless, some big stories of ’64 (some irrelevant, some more significant) have been retained in the hard drive of my memory – so much so, that there seems little capacity left for more recent stuff that seems to dematerialise as soon as it’s taken in.

My younger associates are sometimes amazed at the trivia I can come out with from my youth, for example that first telephone number, the Ford Classic my headmaster ran, the registration number of my friend’s dad’s Ford Popular, the cost (6d) of my weekly TV21 comic and the name of nearly every boy in my 3rd form class on those long whole-school photographs taken every year where the photographer’s camera panned from left to right and we were all told to “keep still, boy!” We had nicknames for all our ‘masters’ – Chalky, The Baz, Johnno, Nev, The Twitch and Mr Woodhouse’s moniker ‘Timbershack’. It’s all there, stored away, and occasionally gets all mixed up in my dreams into a weird video-maelstrom of past and present.

Digressing (as I do) the some news events of ’64 come to mind:

Harold Wilson’s Labour government took office following the October general election, beating the Conservatives and Sir Alex Douglas-Home’s premiership. Poor AD-H was never very good televisually – appearing like a white skull in front of the camera, and he never really warmed to television, unlike his successor at No. 10. Here was a man of no Oxbridge strain – a grammar school boy – who captured the mood of the nation with his “white heat of technology” speech at the previous year’s Labour Party Conference. I read somewhere that Harold preferred a good cigar to his pipe, but a pipe was a little more working class. Urban myth maybe, but it’s a good story.

In December, the news was that the death penalty was finally to be abolished and, as a consequence, ‘Moors Murderers’ Ian Brady and Myra Hindley escaped with life sentences where previously they would surely have been hanged. Even though capital punishment was handed out less and less over the previous few years, the last executions did take place in 1964 at Walton Gaol in Liverpool and Strangeways in Manchester.

And on the subject of criminality, the Great Train Robbers whose £2.6m haul in August of 1963 had been almost romanticised by the press, were handed out a total of 307 years in sentences at Buckinghamshire Assizes on 16 April.

Then there were the railways – Oh! Doctor Beeching – what can be said? In this year, Richard Beeching resigned as chairman of the British Railways Board and my memories of my parents bewailing the closure of many of the smaller railway lines are as clear today as they were in this year of change. After all, we weren’t a car-owning family then, so buses and trains were very important and the demise of the branch lines was something of an inconvenience.

Donald Campbell set the world water speed record on New Year’s Eve in Australia and yet the later news story of his death three years later probably meant more to me as that happened much nearer home. The Campbell story was indeed one of derring-do and ultimately, tragedy.

The Year Everything Changed… certainly for me and many of my peers, it did seem that there was change in the air, although we probably weren’t as aware of it until much later in life. We just accepted it as ‘the way things were’ at that time. In personal moments of reflection, I think of the music, the fashion, the changes that took place in broadcasting in television and radio, the changes afoot in education and science and those also within my own home and family that probably moulded me into the person I became. Every generation could probably say the same about its own ‘year of the decade’ but ‘sixty four’ is certainly up there as a milestone.

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

Matt Monro sang…

“Zal is freshness with a zing!
Everyday, yes, Zal’s the thing!
For the springy, zingy smell of pine!
Zal disinfectant every time!

Zal kills germs, kicks them out!
Zal leaves the zing of pine about!
You’ll notice the difference with everything!
Zal is freshness with a zing!”

Children of the sixties – or ‘babyboomers’ as sociologists are wont to call us – carry with them an unusual legacy to accompany their memories of black and white television, President Kennedy and the Beatles. As independent television spread through the regions in the late fifties and early sixties, children were brought face-to-face with the power of the advertising jingle.

Imported from American commercial radio of the forties, these were ITV’s secret weapon in its first decade of advertising. The only screen commercials with which the British public was familiar – in the cinema – had been the hard sell with relatively little use of jingles. By the time Lew Grade, Sidney Bernstein and Howard Thomas were in full swing, jingles were hitting the ear from every angle.

As a baby boomer now in his sixties, I remain haunted – nay, assailed – by the jingles of my youth, which play in my head without invitation on an almost daily basis (“One, two, three, four, reasons why Julie Andrews likes Ryvita!”). Whether the original advertising agencies intended these children to be humming the tunes fifty years later is not on record.

But, as many of the products concerned are no longer available, one suspects that their efforts peaked too late. (“In days of old, fruits were sold that had to be washed by hand, but now they are sold ready washed by Whitworths. Whitworths are a girl’s best friend!”). In the advertising world of today, jingles themselves are passé. Some have survived (“A Mars a day helps you work, rest and play!”) whilst others have been hurriedly modified to suit the advertising standards authorities (“Malteasers, the chocolate with the less fattening centre!” becoming a more truthful though less fun “Malteasers, the chocolate with the crisp, lighter centre!”).

The jingles of the sixties were, of course, the nursery rhymes of the electrical age. Sung in the playground, hummed in the classroom, even used in freeform essay punishments, they were the very essence of capitalism, worming their way permanently into your brain. A peculiar feature of 50s advertising, which credited viewers with being gormless, required the product name to be endlessly repeated (“Remember the name, Persil!”). This habit so infected speech patterns that even today, on stating a brand name, one can be tempted to repeat it endlessly.

A particular feature of 50s and 60s copywriting was twisting the wording to make it rhyme (“Eveninks and morninks I drink Warninks! Warninks Advocaat!”). Or the even more absurd tendency – to state the utterly meaningless with sublime conviction (“Eden Vale yogurt is the young idea!”). The implication of the deranged state of a shopper’s mind was never far from the surface. The suggestion that housewives – for it was always housewives – thought of nothing but product was strong. (“Always ask for Newfarm, Newfarm eggs, fresh from the farm for you!”). While the equally offensive suggestion – that husbands were always on hand to sort things out – was also a constant refrain. Some jingles have entered the folklore of the nation. “Don’t forget the Fruit Gums, Mum!” and “Beanz meanz Heinz!” always there to remind us of the power of marketing.

But it is the poetry of the obscure that stays with me (“Look into the jar, it’s a deep rich brown, ’cause there’s coffee pot freshness all the way down!”). These rhymes were the mantras of a secular age. Questions, statements of loyalty, a form of hypnosis (“All the family loves Carnation, ’cause it’s creamy rich!”).

Whether to laugh or cry is never entirely clear. I am both the prisoner of these nightmares and reminded of the comfort of a sixties childhood while in their soothing embrace. Even my gravestone may one day bear the footnote “Ricicles are twicicles as nicicles!”.

The post Brainwashes whiter appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

Days before the official end of World War II in Europe, the coalition government decided to abolish the civil defence structure built up in the run up to and during the Blitz.

Peace was at hand, and civil defence was expensive. Keeping a large payroll of officers and men, plus the physical manifestations in Emergency Water Supplies, Air Raid shelters and First Aid Posts now that there was no longer any threat from Germany was expensive. That money – and so much more – would be needed to fund the reconstruction of our battered islands.

The decision was seen as being proved right when the US ended the war completely in August 1945 by the use of a new ‘superweapon’ – the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan in an effort to save the 2 or 3 years and 1,000,000 Allied lives it had been thought that a conventional war in mainland Japan would cost.

However, the United States’ atomic bomb project was heavily leaking, and the USSR soon had its hands on the full specifications of ‘Fat Man’, the Nagasaki bomb. Using captured German rocket scientists and their own nuclear physicists, the Soviet Union set out to develop their own superweapon – largely out of fear that the West would use their A-bombs as a threat to keep the Soviets in their place.

On 29 August 1949, the USSR detonated ‘First Lightning’, their recreation of ‘Fat Man’. On 1 September, a US weather plane, which was looking for signs of fallout from Soviet tests, found the atmospheric pollution caused by the explosion. The Western monopoly on nuclear weapons was over. The Cold War had begun in earnest.

The Attlee government reactivated the Civil Defence system. Whilst there was far less infrastructure compared to that of the Second World War, a command structure and wardens would be needed in the event that this new Cold War became a Hot War, as inevitably this would mean a nuclear exchange would take place. Even if it happened in continental Europe, fallout would remain a problem. People would panic. There would be a need for air raid wardens to help keep the peace. There would be pressure on the ambulance services and the fire brigades. Someone would need to take charge. What if London was hit? The Civil Defence system would need to keep the rest of the country running until central control could be reestablished.

Through the 1950s, the Civil Defence system was kept going largely as a reserve. Bring people in, train them, send them back to their lives, ready to be called back up should The Bomb drop.

And then came the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1961 there had been an armed stand-off between Soviet forces in East Berlin and American, British and French forces in the west of the city. This had exposed how a nuclear war would most likely be triggered by a conventional war, and both types of war would be fought in Europe. Partially as a response, NATO positioned US nuclear missiles in Turkey, as close to the Soviet Union as they could get. Too close.

The USSR responded by sending nuclear missiles to be stationed in Cuba, as close to the United States as they could get. Too close.

Another stand-off happened, lasting almost a fortnight, before both sides quietly withdrew their too close for the other’s comfort weapons. But this stand-off was terrifying, especially to politicians of all stripes. It showed that a nuclear war didn’t have to be started by a conventional one. Instead, one could just happen, with effectively no notice at all.

The Macmillan government started to put a lot of money and time into the Civil Defence system. The telegraph wires and poles strung along the edges of almost all railway lines were hurried buried under the cess at the edge of track. Broadcasting stations, large railway signal boxes, government communications hubs, even council offices, were quickly reinforced against all but a direct hit. Infrastructure started to appear again. Most of all, the appeal went out: if you’re able-bodied, we would like to train you in civil defence and keep you in reserve for when – it didn’t seem like it was if – for when a nuclear war came.

This 1964 advertisement appeals to men and women to join the Civil Defence system, get their training, become part of a unit ready to be activated at any time. The training included first aid, fire fighting, civil disorder and defence-in-depth tactics. It was backed with a campaign that ran on television. There was no expense spared on this vital service.

In 1968, following a sharp devaluation of sterling, the Wilson government started to look for ways to save money. The £20 million a year cost (£346 million in today’s money, allowing for inflation) of the Civil Defence system looked like it was being wasted. The Cold War had gone quiet. The two German states had reached an entente; the Berlin Wall effectively separated not only the people of Berlin but the occupying forces as well; the Vietnam War was distracting the Americans; a war of words with China that was to spill over into a border conflict was distracting the Soviets.

The task of Civil Defence was handed directly to local authorities instead of being decided – and financed – by the Home Office. Each council drew up a local plan and co-ordinated it with their police, fire and ambulance services. The Civil Defence reserves were abolished and the build-up in infrastructure reversed. Should there now be a nuclear war, the government would provide advice and information on how to protect and survive to the people, but everything else was down to your local council to organise.

There was an element of gambling in this – local authorities had often been woefully bad at organising Civil Defence in 1938/9, so it was hoped that the younger members now in most council chambers would be a bit better should it be needed again. There was also the gamble that Civil Defence would actually never be needed – that the massive stockpiles of weapons held by NATO and the Warsaw Pact (and, from 1964, China) meant Mutually Assured Destruction, and therefore those weapons would never be used.

We’re still waiting to find that out.

The post People like you are joining Civil Defence now! 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.

Hi!

Welcome to the Big “L” Club – the Club that has members all over the British Isles and also Holland, France, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Poland and even America, Africa, Indonesia and New Zealand. The station doesn’t of course cover this great area but nevertheless its fame seems to have spread throughout the world.

About the Ship . . . She is a converted U.S. Minesweeper, 10000tons – during the last war she swept over 500 mines, shot down 4 enemy aircraft and rescued hundreds of survivors from the sea. She is now called the M.V. GALAXY and is anchored 4 miles off Harwich. The Radio Transmitter is a 50kw R.C.A. Ampliphase and the Antenna is a shunt fed 200 ft. high mast.

The Ship’s Crew, which numbers 24, includes 6 engineers – three of whom are in charge of the transmitter. A Cook Steward and his two assistants look after the catering side.

The D.J’s spend a busy two weeks on board followed by one week ashore – when they may go home, although they are far likelier to be making recording arrangements with all the celebrities who appear on Radio London, or collecting further material for their various shows . . . however here are a few facts about the D.J’s themselves:

TONY WINDSOR – Born in Melbourne, Australia. His first serious job was when he joined the broadcasting station 2 S.M. Sydney as a Sales Representative, later working as an announcer. He afterwards became the Station’s Number One D.J. and remained with them for seven and a half years. The highest rated D.J. in Australia, he was offered the No.1 spot with the Macquarie Broadcasting Network operating 87 stations – the biggest network “Down Under”. He is 6’2″, dark haired, blue-eyed. Keen on tennis, cricket, boxing and horse-racing, he is also a member of 32 surf clubs.

EARL RICHMOND – Born in Highgate, London. Started with the Forces Broadcasting Service in September,1948, as Announcer and Scriptwriter in Trieste. Continued with F.B.S. from 1951-1957, gaining experience in all aspects of sound broadcasting.

He freelanced in various stations all round the world, then studied television in the United States. In July 1959 he joined I.T.V. as a Transmission Controller, and later did freelance work with Southern Television before joining Radio London as a Disc Jockey.

DAVE DENNIS – Born in Croydon. Originally took up farming and the outdoor life, but this career was not to last long, as he wanted to act. He studied drama for three years at the Central School before going into Repertory. Early in 1964 he decided to turn to Radio and has, since then, been working as a D.J.

Hazel-eyed, slim, dark, 6’0″, his hobbies are writing and wireless.

PETE BRADY – Born in Montreal and educated there. In 1958 he was a well-known voice on Radio Jamaica – the disc spinning experience stood him in good stead on his arrival in London where he led the double life of Assistant Film Producer by day and D.J. by night. He has represented the West Indies and England in major Water Skiing Championships throughout the world.

He is dark-haired, 5’9″ tall, and has blue-grey eyes. Likes flying, motor-racing, water skiing, most beat and pop records, folk music and Dusty Springfield.

PAUL KAY – Born in England. Went into Repertory Theatre as an actor and stage manager – this took him to Nairobi in 1952. With the Mau Mau emergency at its height he served with the Kenya Police in the Department of Information, African Broadcasting Service. His work included running an up-country broadcasting station N.Y.E.R.I. near Kenya’s famous Tree Tops Hotel. In I960 he went to Cyprus and organised Cyprus Magazine and Jazz for the Forces. His interviews have included hundreds of the famous and infamous.

Among his interests are playing the piano and guitar. Amateur photography, competition motoring and horse-riding are his only outdoor hobbies.

DAVE CASH – A Londoner by birth, he went to Canada in 1958 where he commenced radio work at C.J.A.V. Radio, Port Alberni, British Columbia.

Aged 22, dark-haired, with blue-green eyes, he likes dancing, bowling, good movies, fast cars and Ivy League clothes. Favourite singers include Ray Charles, James Brown and Sandie Shaw.

KENNY EVERETT – Born in Liverpool. Started in the advertising world, working in an advertising section of a newspaper office. Always interested in radio, he contacted various stations and sent them demonstration tapes. This approach proved successful and after a few month’s wait he was offered the job of Disc Jockey with Radio London.

Dark haired, 5’9″, blue-eyed and 20 years of age, he is fond of travelling by ‘plane, likes Alfred Hitchcock films, Peter Sellars, Cilia Black, Nina Simmone and the Beatles.

DUNCAN JOHNSON – Born in Toronto, Canada. He spent four years travelling around North America from Havana to the Yukon, working on oil rigs, driving trucks or working in logging camps when the financial situation demanded it. He started work in radio, at the suggestion of a French-Canadian friend who had applied for a D.J’s job but was not acceptable owing to his accent. Duncan spent two years in commercial radio and T.V. in Western Canada and a further eighteen months in Bermuda.

He is 26 with light brown hair and grey eyes, and is 6’3″ tall. He is a keen but poor golfer and prefers just watching most sports, but still thinks ice hockey is the most spectacular to watch or play. He likes almost every type of music.

MARQUEE CLUB

Have you been to the Big “L” disc session, at the Marquee every Saturday from 2.30 p.m. until 5.00 p.m.? I do hope so.

It would be terrible to think of you missing all the fun. If you have not been, why not go this week, it’s a real rave. Each week you can meet your favourite D.J’s and see all the pop stars, like Connie Francis, Gene Pitney, Manfred Mann, the Ivy League and many, many more. The Club is situated at 90, Wardour Street, W.1. This is the third turning on the left along Shaftesbury Avenue from Piccadilly Circus. Don’t forget if you do come, the admission fee is only 3/- per head for Big “L” Club members or 4/- for non-members.

Big “L” also visits the Wimbledon Palais every Saturday evening, with its Popular D.J’s there to see that everything moves along at a frantic pace. Keep listening to 266 for full details.

BIG “L” CLUB SPECIAL OFFERS

Now a word about the fabulous special bargains we have to offer you. The one that is most beneficial to club members is a wonderful eight-transistor radio complete with carrying case, aerial, earphone and an extra battery. The price of this marvellous set is £5.15.0d. but club members can get one for only £5.5.0d. that’s a saving of 10 shillings. One other great feature of this radio is that it has been specially adjusted to receive Radio London loud and clear.

The next thing I know many of you want is a Big “L” tee-shirt. For those of you who have not yet seen one, let me try to describe it. The front has the R.L. symbol, and the back features in big, bold black lettering – BIG L 266. Again there is a reduction in price for club members, 11/6 as opposed to 12/6 for non-members.

Also some really fashionable,eye-catching identity bracelets, silver or 22 carat gold-plated with a strong chain and secure fastener. These are offered to you at the amazingly low price of 10 shillings. Each bracelet comes in its own smart presentation case.

Photos of the Disc Jockeys are now available at 9d. each or 4/8d. for a set of eight – but you as a Club Member pay only 3/6d per set. We also have gay yellow and black pennants for 1/9 – and extra badges can be obtained at 3/9d. each.

I’ll be in touch with you from time to time with the latest news of the Big “L” Club and its activities.

Yours,

Robyn Rodgers

The post The Big L Club appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

Dad had been in the RAF as a wartime radar operator. When he was demobbed, he – like thousands of other men – just wanted to come home, get married, start a family and live a normal life. He saved, and by December 1958 he and my mother had the deposit to buy a house. £2,120. No, that wasn’t the deposit, that was the total price of a 3-bedroom house. Those were the days.

We moved out of our London rented flat to Rochford, a little Essex market town, just outside Southend-on-Sea. Onto a brand new estate built where previously Holt Farm has been, so our address was Holt Farm Way.

Faces of 1964

I attended the local primary school – Holt Farm School. There was a lot of farming around us. But most of the men on our estate commuted the one-hour train journey to London. Rochford became a dormitory town, and then the cattle market closed.

I remember my father coming home one evening from a Parent-Teacher Association meeting at the school: he was incensed. The chairman of the governors – a Mr Tabor, who owned and ran the local Tabor Farms – had got up in the meeting and announced that Rochford children did not need advanced education: they would find plenty of employment as farm labourers locally! The meeting erupted into riot. Those present were largely white collar workers in the City, and they weren’t having their children tilling the soil. They may have used slightly more colourful language than that.

This story serves to illustrate that, quietly at first, a social revolution was taking place in the late 1950s – heralding the Swinging Sixties.

When my sister was born in 1956, Dad bought Mum a “present” of a television set (though I reckon he benefitted from it as well). When we moved to Rochford, my schoolboy curiosity led me to switch away from Channel 1 (BBC) and Channel 9 (ITV), and, like Howard Carter breaking into Tutankhamun’s tomb, I discovered “wonderful things”!

Although I was a loyal fan of Pussycat Willum on Associated-Rediffusion (weekdays only, of course), and Robin Hood on ATV London (weekends), living in South-East Essex I found Southern Television on Channel 10, and Anglia on Channel 11. (Reception wasn’t that good, but I could guess most of it.) And every ITV station seemingly began with different start of day music. I was hooked: to this day, Richard Allinson’s Southern Rhapsody and the accompanying black and white film of views of the South and South-East of England still makes me weirdly emotional. And Handel’s Water Music will forever in my mind be associated with Anglia’s silver knight on horseback.

The programmes were almost as good! Southern Television’s Three Go Round with presenters Britt Allcroft (later to own the Thomas the Tank Engine franchise), Tony Bastable (who went on to co-present Magpie) and “the third one whose name I can never remember” saw me through my early teenage years when BBC’s Blue Peter simply wasn’t cool enough.

Switching to Channel 10 also gave me sight of TWW’s Movie Magazine, hosted by Bruce Lewis and his teenage son, Peter. Peter Lewis went on to become one of LWT’s most popular continuity announcers.

But back to 1964. With my increasing obsession with television presentation, it was no wonder that on 6 April of that year, when Associated-Rediffusion metamorphosed into Rediffusion, London, I was orgasmic in my excitement! (Not my first orgasm, but like any teenage boy, details of the others had best remain in embarrassed secrecy.) I discovered SANS SERIF typefaces! Microgramma Bold Extended – yes, yes, YES!! I found a seedy artists’ materials shop in a Southend shopping arcade, and acquired – in a paper bag – a Letraset catalogue. Whilst my contemporaries may have been salivating over Health and Efficiency magazines, I got off on pages from that catalogue… Times Roman, Helvetica, and – I’m not ashamed to admit it – the odd Grotesk.

Saturday early evening in the 1960s may have been the time for BBC Juke Box Jury, but for me A-R’s Ready, Steady, Go! was The Only Show In Town. It took some hard negotiating, and more than a few teenage tantrums, before my parents would permit us to watch RSG live on Friday evenings – “The Weekend Starts Here” – while we sat with our meal on our laps in the lounge. Presenters Keith Fordyce and Cathy McGowan dictated my music tastes: She Loves You – The Beatles; Do Wah Diddy Diddy – Manfred Mann; Glad All Over – The Dave Clark Five; Have I the Right – The Honeycombs; and (when I was feeling particularly rebellious) Little Red Rooster – Rolling Stones. Though my grandmother could never get used to “that Max Jagger”.

I had the bonus of being able to watch a repeat of RSG on Southern on a Sunday afternoon – and spotted that someone (perhaps the presentation engineer at Southern?) was substituting “The Weekend Starts Here” with “Here – Now – Here – Now – Here”. I could see through their cunning ploy.

1964 saw the premier of one of my favourite films of all time – A Hard Day’s Night, starring The Beatles. OK, John, Paul, George and Ringo were amusing enough, but it was Richard Lester’s direction and the black and white cinematography that really got to me. And the closing credits!! Oh wow! I think I might have used the word “genius” in critical acclaim for the first time then.

Wikipedia puts it very well. British critic Leslie Halliwell states the film’s influence as

“…it led directly to all the kaleidoscopic swinging London spy thrillers and comedies of the later sixties”. In particular, the visuals and storyline are credited with inspiring The Monkees’ television series. The “Can’t Buy Me Love” segment borrowed stylistically from Richard Lester’s earlier The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film, and it is this segment, in particular using the contemporary technique of cutting the images to the beat of the music, which has been cited as a precursor of modern music videos. Roger Ebert goes even further, crediting Lester for a more pervasive influence, even constructing “a new grammar”: “He influenced many other films. Today when we watch TV and see quick cutting, hand-held cameras, interviews conducted on the run with moving targets, quickly intercut snatches of dialogue, music under documentary action and all the other trademarks of the modern style, we are looking at the children of A Hard Day’s Night”.

In the past, I may have mentioned once or twice that, at the age of 60, I re-trained as a broadcast journalist. From the start of the course, I was challenged to make and edit 2- or 3-minute videos. Whilst much of the work had to be serious, objective reporting, it occurs to me now that at times I was re-making A Hard Day’s Night! My professional tutor may not have been that impressed by my hand-held shots and quick cutting, but he probably wasn’t born in 1964.

One element in the film disturbed me a bit – not Wilfrid Brambell’s portrayal of a very clean old man, but the way Alun Owen’s script, voiced by George Harrison, obviously ripped into Cathy McGowan:

Simon Marshall: Anyway, if you don’t cooperate, you won’t meet Susan.
George: And who’s this Susan when she’s at home?
Simon Marshall: Only Susan Canby, our resident teenager. You’ll have to love her, she’s your symbol.
George: Oh, you mean that posh bird who gets everything wrong?
Simon Marshall: I beg your pardon?
George: Oh, yeah. The lads frequently sit ’round the television and watch her for a giggle. In fact, once, we all sat down, wrote these letters, saying how gear she was and all that rubbish.
Simon Marshall: She’s a trendsetter. It’s her profession!
George: She’s a DRAG – a well-known drag. We turn the sound down on her and say rude things.
Simon Marshall: [horrified] Get him out of here…!
George: Have I said something amiss?
Simon Marshall: Get him out! He’s knocking the program’s image!
George: Sorry about the shirts!
Simon Marshall: [angrily] GET HIM OUT!

My style and music guru was being mocked. Maybe I shouldn’t have believed everything Cathy McGowan said, uncritically. That was a nail in the coffin of my adolescent innocence.

As a teenager, I was given a Medium Wave radio for my birthday. Not for me a portable, battery-driven set. No, as a child I’d had a battery-driven electric train set, and had not been impressed with the huge Ever Ready batteries it regularly drained. So I requested and received a little mains-driven radio (I think it even had valves).

I have to say I enjoyed several programmes on the BBC Home Service and BBC Light Programme: Two-Way Family Favourites with Jean Metcalfe, Beyond Our Ken starring Kenneth Horne, Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America and Today with Jack de Manio, who could never give an accurate time-check and was loved by (most of) the British public for his incompetence.

However, it was in the evenings that my radio really came into its own: Radio Luxembourg (“Did you know, Dad, that there is a country called Luxembourg?”) on 208 metres. It was trendy, popular and modern, but because of the way it broadcast from the Continent it had a habit of fading at the most crucial moments, which could be annoying. You could try tape-recording your favourite tunes – I had a tape-recorder, an Elizabethan reel-to-reel 3¾ inches per second, two-track machine, but I’m not one to boast – but you’d be lucky to get more than a minute of music before interference overwhelmed the tune. And, because Radio Luxembourg’s programmes were sponsored, even if the recording was successful, the music tracks were frequently faded in the studio after no more than half the song had been played. There had to be something better.

The solution came in the form of a ship’s bell. Ding-ding! Car-o-line, Car-o-li-yay-yay-ine… for the first time in centuries, the United Kingdom experienced piracy on the high seas!

I’ll let Wikipedia tell the story:

Radio Caroline is a British radio station founded by Irish musician manager and businessman Ronan O’Rahilly to circumvent the record companies’ control of popular music broadcasting in the United Kingdom, and the BBC’s radio broadcasting monopoly. Unlicensed by any government, it was a pirate radio station that never actually became illegal, although after the Marine Offences Act (1967) it became illegal for a British subject to associate with it.

O’Rahilly failed to obtain airplay on Radio Luxembourg for Georgie Fame’s records because it was committed to sponsored programmes promoting major record labels; EMI, Decca, Pye and Philips.

Encouraged by Scandinavian and Dutch pirates, in February 1964 O’Rahilly obtained the former Danish passenger ferry, Fredericia, which was converted into a radio ship at the Irish port of Greenore, owned by O’Rahilly’s father. O’Rahilly named the station after Caroline Kennedy, daughter of U.S. President John F. Kennedy.

The Fredericia was renamed MV Caroline and anchored off Felixstowe, where it began test transmissions on Friday, 27 March 1964. On Saturday, 28 March, it began regular broadcasting at noon on 197.3 metres (announced as 199 metres, rhyming with the name) with the opening conducted by Simon Dee. Radio Caroline’s first musical theme was Jimmy McGriff’s “Round Midnight”, a jazz standard co-composed by Thelonious Monk. In March 1964, The Fortunes recorded “Caroline”, which became the station’s theme. The station’s slogan was “Your all-day music station”, and it initially broadcast from 6 am to 6 pm, seven days a week.

Simon Dee’s opening theme tune – like the ITV companies’ start of day music – sent a chill down my spine: “On The Sunny Side of the Street”, by Tommy Dorsey and the Sentimentalists. (In my opinion, no other version comes close!) PA-DA-da da-da-da; PA-DA-da da-da-da… the opening bars DEMAND your attention! The notes repeat four times, and after 18 seconds, you’re begging for the main theme to begin. It’s a genius choice music track, I think, to open a radio show: Simon Dee chose it, and if I was ever given the chance I’d choose it for my show too. As playout at the end of a show, it’s not too shabby either: it has a great ending.

Round Midnight was a good choice for Radio Caroline’s close-down, though you had to sit through 30 minutes of The World Tomorrow sponsored by the Radio Church of God, featuring Garner Ted Armstrong, to actually hear the close-down. As Medium Wave radio reception began to deteriorate, once evening began, so Round Midnight would sink beneath the waves of interference and become infused with white noise: it was quite theatrical!

As a teenage adolescent aka rampant bag of hormones, I was hardly amenable to any proposal for a family day out, let alone one to the seaside. But in the summer of 1964, to my parents’ total astonishment, I readily agreed to a day trip from Rochford to Clacton! Well, I say Clacton, but – to coin a phrase – my mother had “ideas above her station” and she specified we would spend the day at the more-genteel, nearby Frinton, where motorists (to my great mirth) were instructed that there should be “No parking on the greensward”! But why would yours truly, an acne-ridden youth with a bad haircut, be excited by Frinton??

Because, just round the headland to the north, was Harwich and… Felixstowe! Remember that Radio Caroline was anchored in international waters off Felixstowe. So I happily joined the family outing, and was able to gaze out to sea, and observe the tiny blob that was corrupting teenage children’s musical tastes and infuriating the GPO and BBC. It was my pilgrimage to Decca Mecca.

Returning home, the seeds of my future (minor) broadcasting career were germinating, and in the autumn of 1964 I inflicted “radio shows” on my bemused, younger sister in the adjoining bedroom via an extension speaker. As Christmas approached, I decided we should send a Yuletide-greeting audio tape to my mother’s best friend who had emigrated with her husband and young family to Calgary in Canada. Audio tape was precious, but I was prepared to sacrifice my smallest BASF tape to the cause of promoting international understanding, specifically between Rochford and Calgary. Aged 15, I became executive producer of the recording, instructing my father, mother and little sister to make audio contributions, seated around the dining room table.

Of course, these were simply the “warm-up” acts to the main event – namely, my own contribution. This was an audio summary of Radio Caroline’s first few months of output, including the ship’s bell… I refused to cut my precious tape, so I had to stop my voice recording, wait until I could successfully record Caroline’s bell, and then continue my presentation. I concluded with a recording of The Beatles’ She Loves You in full: I mean, one had to bring some culture to the colonies, didn’t one?

It is only literally now, in 2018, some 54 years later, as I type this, that it occurs to me that my mother’s best friend and her family were Jewish. And I sent them a Christmas tape. Talk about cultural insensitivity!

The 1960s were an extraordinary era to live through – but I didn’t appreciate it at the time. Why would I? I’d never lived as a teenager at any other time. But looking back, the world was changing, and I was part of that change. By the end of the 1960s, I’d won an Open Exhibition (it’s like an Open Scholarship, but less money) to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. The 1960s made that possible: added to my £40 a year Exhibition, I received a maintenance grant from Essex County Council, and free tuition at one of the top universities in the world. The United Kingdom then was geared towards upward social mobility, provided one was a white male, and I grabbed the opportunity. Not bad for an Essex boy, who might otherwise have been destined to be an agricultural labourer.

I must confess, though, that an awful lot of 1964 passed me by – either I missed it, or I wasn’t sufficiently interested to take note of it:

• January 11 – United States Surgeon General Luther Terry reports that smoking may be hazardous to one’s health.
• January 18 – Plans to build the New York City World Trade Center are announced.
• February 11 – Greeks and Turks begin fighting in Limassol, Cyprus.
• April 20 – Nelson Mandela makes his “I Am Prepared to Die” speech at the opening of the Rivonia Trial, a key event for the anti-apartheid movement.
• May 1 – At 4:00 a.m., John George Kemeny and Thomas Eugene Kurtz run the first computer program written in BASIC (Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), an “easy-to-learn high-level programming language” they created.
• May 28 – The Charter of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) is released by the Arab League.
• June 11 – In Cologne, West Germany, Walter Seifert attacks students and teachers in an elementary school with a flamethrower, killing 10.
• July 2 – President Lyndon Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, officially abolishing racial segregation in the United States.
• July 19 – Vietnam War: At a rally in Saigon, South Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyễn Khánh calls for expanding the war into North Vietnam.
• August 13 – Murderers Gwynne Owen Evans and Peter Anthony Allen become the last people to be executed in the United Kingdom.
• September 11 – In Jacksonville, Florida, John Lennon announces that The Beatles will not play to a segregated audience.
• October 1 – Dr. Robert Moog demonstrates the prototype Moog synthesizer.
• October 10 (approx) – Germaine Greer becomes the first full female member of Cambridge University Footlights revue after joining in her first week at Newnham College, Cambridge.
• October 22 – A Federal Multi-Party Parliamentary Committee selects a design to become the new official Flag of Canada.
• November 10 – Australia partially reintroduces compulsory military service due to the Indonesian Confrontation.

Maybe I should have paid more attention.

Will a 15-year old in 2018 look back with awe and wonder at the events that took place this year? Will he or she vow that it really was the best time to be alive as a teenager? I somewhat doubt it, but I just hope I am still alive when that youngster achieves adulthood and is mature enough to look back.

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In order to provide this diversity the BBC broadcasts three programmes, the Home Service, the Light Programme and the Third Network which includes as a major element the Third Programme. These programmes are described in greater detail in the following pages. Each programme has its own character and is planned within its own framework, but there is also complementary planning between the services to ensure, for example, that programmes of the same type are not broadcast at the same time on different wavelengths.

The form and content of radio programmes are continually changing to keep pace with developments. One of these developments has been the very rapid spread of the small portable transistor set in the last few years; in 1963 alone some 2 million were sold. Another development has been the increasing popularity of the car radio set, about 1½ million of which are estimated to be in use at present. The freedom to listen in any room, or in the car, or in the garden, or away from home is undoubtedly one of the reasons for the increase in the daily average audience. At the same time greater mobility has meant that many listeners cannot or do not want to concentrate for long periods on programmes. For this reason the BBC has increased the number of magazine type programmes, such as ‘Today’ and ‘Roundabout’, which can provide entertainment for those whose listening time is limited.

It is unfortunate that the increase in the number of transistors has not been matched by a comparable development in the use of VHF sets. Reception in the overcrowded medium- and long-wave bands continues to be difficult in many areas, in marked contrast to the interference-free reception which VHF can provide. VHF is particularly valuable for listeners to the Third Network. Medium

wave coverage of this network reaches only 69 per cent of the population while VHF coverage is 98.4 per cent. Yet another advantage is the greatly superior quality of VHF reproduction, a fact of significance to music lovers for whom the new Music Programme is planned. Although more and more listeners are turning to VHF – about 350,000 VHF sets are bought each year – the BBC hopes that this pace will accelerate.

1964 saw the beginning of the sound radio extensions which were recommended by the Committee on Broadcasting and subsequently approved by the Government. These had been held up by contractual difficulties which were resolved during the course of the year. They include an earlier opening at 5.30 a.m. and later closing at 2.00 a.m. for Light Programme and the broadcasting of a serious music programme on Third Network during the daytime. The extensions are being introduced by stages, and further details are given in the following pages. An extra half-hour was added each day from Mondays to Fridays during the winter months to the Third Programme.

Home Service

The Home Service, which serves the broad middle section of the community, necessarily overlaps to a certain extent with the Light Programme on one hand and with the Third Programme on the other. But it has its own distinctive characteristics. It carries out many of the functions of information and education enjoined on the BBC in the preamble to its Royal Charter, being, for example, the main vehicle of news, and for daily reporting on Parliamentary proceedings when the House is sitting. In the field of current affairs it exploits fully the potentialities of radio for rapid world-wide coverage in its provision both of news and of comment and discussion. The Home Service carries sound broadcasting’s programme for schools. Its music programmes concentrate on the great standard works. It broadcasts several dramatic productions each week, including stage plays, serials, works written specially for radio, and adaptations from novels. Its programmes provide a basic national pattern which can be varied by each regional Home Service to suit the particular needs of the region in question.

Light Programme

The main purpose of the Light Programme is to provide a service of entertainment and relaxation for the majority. Its basic ingredients are popular music, light music, comedy, and light drama, which includes the daily serials. Brief news summaries are broadcast at half past the hour every day, with a more restricted service on Saturdays and Sundays. Short weather forecasts are provided as part of a general service, and a special service of shipping forecasts on 1,500 metres is provided for those at sea in coastal areas.

Sporting events of many kinds are covered in the Sports Service transmitted on the Third Network wavelengths on Saturdays, and this frees the Light Programme for the broadcasting of entertainment music specially designed for those who listen on car radios and transistor and portable radio sets. This policy has increasingly been extended to other daytime listening hours, particularly at week-ends.

Full attention is paid to the interests of the home listener who has no television set or may not wish to spend all his time watching television. This is particularly so in the evenings, when the schedules include as wide a variety of programmes as is consistent with the main purpose of the Light Programme.

Third Network

The Third Network consists of the Third Programme, the Music Programme, and other programmes designed to appeal to minorities of one sort or another including ‘Study Session’ and the Sports Service.

The Music Programme, which is being introduced by stages, will, when completed, be broadcast every day of the week, on Monday to Friday from breakfast time to the early evening, on Saturday from breakfast time to the start of the Sports Service, and on Sunday from breakfast time to the start of the Third Programme at 5 p.m. Its programmes will cover the whole field of good music, including orchestral and chamber concerts, opera, recitals, and light music.

‘Study Session’ is broadcast from Monday to Friday between 6.30 and 7.30 p.m. It serves minority audiences who seek to increase their knowledge or extend their awareness in some particular field – for example, by learning languages (Russian, French, German, Italian, Spanish) or studying in some detail a period of history (The Greeks, The Normans, The Renaissance) or deepening understanding of some area of contemporary affairs, whether political, social, literary or scientific. There are regular programmes in science, social studies, current affairs, music, education, and the arts.

On Saturday afternoons a special Sports Service is broadcast which provides a continuous programme of commentaries and reports on sporting events. The Third Network is also used for special programmes including ball-by-ball commentaries of the Test Matches and for experimental broadcasts in stereophony.

The post BBC radio in 1964 appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

Take radio listening first. The sixties have seen a quite marked expansion in listening to BBC sound broadcasts. Since virtually every home has at least one radio receiver, and has had for some years past, a fair measure is the number of hours of listening to them per head of population (excluding infants). Here are the estimates for the past four years:

PER CAPITA TIME SPENT IN LISTENING TO BBC RADIO BETWEEN 7.00 A.M. and 11.00 A.M. EACH WEEK

This expansion has taken place despite the fact that listening after 6.00 p.m. has decreased. Whereas listening per capita before 6.00 p.m. has gone up from 5-7 hours a week per head in 1960-1 to 7.6 hours in 1963/64, listening after 6.00 p.m. has dropped from 1.6 hours to 1.1 hours. The downward trend in evening listening is, of course, nothing new. It is largely a consequence of the growth of television. From the earliest days of television it has been clear that people who have a choice between viewing television and listening to the radio tend to exercise it differently in the evening and in the daytime. In the evening they usually opt for viewing, cutting the time they spend in listening to a mere fraction of its former length. In the daytime, on the other hand, the ‘pull’ of television encounters much stronger resistance. When both television and sound broadcasting are available, substantial numbers of people, who could view, continue to listen. And, of course, there are many hours during which radio holds the field alone. At one time fears were expressed that people whose former listening habits had been broken by television might come to neglect radio in general. Experience has shown there to be little substance in this. The increased use of radio broadcasting in the daytime is indeed very largely accounted for by the listening of people who have television sets.

It must also be pointed out that even though BBC radio’s evening audience is much less than it was in pre-television days it is by no means inconsiderable. Recently (during January-March 1964, for example) it averaged one-and-a-half million persons, nearly half of whom were people who could have viewed had they wished to do so.

The amount of time spent in viewing British television (whether of BBC or ITV) increased during the sixties, but this was to be expected, for the number of people with television sets increased. In the spring of 1960 some 80 per cent of the population had access to a television receiver; four years later this figure had grown to 90 per cent. The table below shows, quarter by quarter, the estimated weekly amount of viewing (whether of BBC-TV or ITV) by those with television sets (the ‘week’ is taken to include 2.00 to 11.00 p.m. on Saturdays, 3.00 to 11 p.m. on Sundays and 5.00 – 11 p.m. on weekdays, making forty-seven hours in all).

PER CAPITA TIME SPENT IN VIEWING TELEVISION EACH WEEK

These figures certainly do not suggest that the sixties have seen any significant change in the amount of time viewers have devoted to viewing. But they do show that viewing fluctuated seasonally quite substantially. In winter people tend to view about 25 per cent more than they do in summer (whereas they listen to radio only about 10 per cent more in winter).

In considering the trend in BBC-TV (as distinct from ITV) viewing, a distinction must be made between ‘multi-channel’ viewers (those who can receive both BBC and ITV programmes) and ‘single-channel’ viewers (those whose sets can only receive BBC-TV). The time devoted by multi-channel viewers to viewing BBC-TV is shown below:

PER CAPITA TIME SPENT IN VIEWING BBC-TV EACH WEEK (MULTI-CHANNEL VIEWERS ONLY)

As will be seen, BBC viewing amongst multi-channel viewers increased by 0.4 hours between 1960-1 and 1961-2 and by a further 0.9 hours in the next year, but decreased by 0.5 hours between 1962-3 and 1963-4.

If each of these figures is expressed as a proportion of all multichannel viewing, they show how much of it, quarter by quarter, was devoted to BBC-TV, thus:

BBC-TV’S ‘SHARE’ OF MULTI-CHANNEL VIEWING

Between April-June 1960 and July-September 1961 the BBC’s ‘share’ fluctuated between 37 per cent and 40 per cent. During the next three quarters (October-December 1961 to April-June 1962) conditions were abnormal, for during much of this period a dispute with Equity affected the nature of ITV programming. However, the BBC’s share in those weeks which were unaffected by the dispute were such as to suggest that a substantial shift would in any case have been apparent. This was confirmed by the results for July-September 1962 – the first fully ‘normal’ quarter after the dispute was settled – for the BBC’s ‘share’ (44 per cent) was found to be appreciably greater than it had been in the corresponding months of 1961 and 1960. A further sharp increase occurred in October-December 1962. Although this was not wholly maintained, the BBC’s ‘share’ in 1963-4 (46 per cent) was substantially larger than it was in 1960-1.

Turning now to single-channel viewers, they can, by definition, only view BBC-TV (unless they view outside their own homes). The annual figures for their viewing were as follows:

PER CAPITA TIME SPENT IN VIEWING BBC-TV EACH WEEK (SINGLE-CHANNEL VIEWING)

(It is of interest to note in passing that the typical single-channel viewer spent almost as much time in viewing one service as the typical multi-channel viewer spent in viewing two.)

To obtain a complete picture of BBC viewing over the years, and of what this amounted to as a proportion of ‘all viewing’, it is necessary to combine the contributions of multi-channel and singlechannel viewers. This gives the following results:

PER CAPITA TIME SPENT IN VIEWING BBC-TV EACH WEEK (ALL VIEWERS)

BBC—TV’s SHARE OF ALL VIEWING

It will be seen that as the years pass these figures become progressively closer to those, given above, for multi-channel viewers only. This is because single-channel viewers are becoming rarer every year. (In 1960-1 one viewer in eight could only view BBC programmes; by 1963-4 this proportion was not much more than one in forty.) In short, with each passing year the area of competition increased. Despite this, the total amount of BBC viewing in 1963-4 equalled that of 1960-1 and the BBC’s share of ‘all viewing’ was slightly greater.

The post Listening and Viewing in the Sixties appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

For two generations of children, Freddie Phillips is best known for the music in the Gordon Murray Trumptonshire trilogy – 1966’s Camberwick Green, 1967’s Trumpton, and 1969’s Chigley, which were on a rotational repeat pattern on BBC-1 until 1985.

In 1964, that fame lay ahead of him. But when BBCtv became BBC-1 in April 1964, it was Freddie Phillips and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop that they turned to for the daily start-up music of the relaunched flagship channel. He composed eight pieces of music – two were used on Sundays because there was a need for a more ‘solemn’ piece before the church service – and anybody who turned on the television before programmes started got to hear them. Pretty soon, people were putting the television on 5 minutes early just to hear them. Here they are.

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Here’s Cliff Michelmore hosting Tonight, speaking to a man who is (semi-seriously) organising other men for the right to have long hair – David Jones, later David Bowie.

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Two Lotteries Acts – 1934 and 1956 – had made national lottery games illegal in the UK. Small, local lotteries could be run, but under very tight rules. Successive governments disapproved of gambling, permitting it only on-course and in members clubs. The only notable exception was football.

The football pools were – and are, they still exist, although they’re no somewhat overshadowed by other forms of gambling – were felt to be harmless. The stakes were small and the payouts were generally small too – the huge wins were rare enough to be national news. The system of pools agents, collecting the coupons and dispersing the prizes, was seen as a good thing, keeping a national game local. And if the the pools didn’t exist, then there was a big possibility that the people would start betting between themselves, or with local back-street bookies, and that would be A Bad Thing.

The pools also required skill, which wasn’t necessary in straight betting on the results of a match, with the person playing using previous form to work out the likely wins, draws and losses each week. This was much more like on-course horserace betting, which suited the great and the good better than the thought of someone betting next week’s rent on a single game.

Horace Batchelor’s Infra Draw method, however, didn’t use form or or any other method of predicting outcomes. Instead, it was more like modern spread betting. People who joined would send their coupon and stake to him, and he’d fill in the coupons. His method rarely won huge payouts, but was pretty well guaranteed to result in a constant stream of small payouts – certainly enough to pay for next week’s entry.

His main outlet for advertising was Radio Luxembourg, and he recorded the advertisements himself, in the (correct) belief that presenting himself as an ordinary guy who had just happened to developed a method he wanted to share with other ordinary guys would be a good sell.

His operation was based in Keynsham, a town halfway between Bristol and Bath that nobody except its residents had heard of. It’s one of those British towns designed to confuse foreigners – the spelling and the pronunciation only having a tangential relationship with each other – joining such mouthbenders as Kirkcudbright, Leominster, Alnwick, Bicester and the kings of these towns, Shrewsbury.

Add that to Radio Luxembourg’s famous fade and the vagaries of medium wave transmission, and you’ve got to spell the town’s name out to ensure your post gets to you. With the adverts in constant rotation on Luxembourg, the line “Keynsham – K-E-Y-N-S-H-A-M – Keynsham” became famous, and people still know the joke of saying it, even though most will have no idea at all what the joke is about.

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Ten years ago, when the shadow of the Television age seemed rather ominous for Sound, few people would have believed that radio in Britain in 1964 would be a medium still in universal currency, still developing, progressing, and expanding. Yet that is our state of health at this juncture. Even though almost 90 per cent of the population of Britain now has television, the latest figures show that from twenty-six to twenty-seven million people use sound radio on the average day, and the figure moves steadily upward year by year. Nor is the use merely a nominal one. Those who listen do so, on an average, for something like two and a quarter hours each day. This continuing interest in radio is supported by the statistics of receiver sales. Last year, radio sets outsold television sets by a comfortable margin in the dealers’ shops. Two and a half million radio receivers were sold in Britain during 1962, an average of one every twelve seconds. Broadcasting’s vast audiences have shown that they require radio as well as television, and have plenty of room for both. Sound’s crisis is past. It has emerged as a medium which demonstrably has an important and valuable future.

But it will be a future with a difference. In looking to 1964 and the years ahead, sound must of course take account of the opportunities which technical development is continually offering. Two such developments are clearly revolutionary. The first is the introduction of the transistor receiver, which can be so small in dimensions and so efficient that it can be taken and used almost everywhere. Through the transistor, sound is fast becoming the truly ubiquitous medium. As the advertising slogan in the USA has it, ‘wherever you go, there’s radio’. The transistor is making sound a personal service for every listener, something that can be at his disposal all the time, rather than something to which he can only come during a few limited hours of the day.

The other major development, VHF, is, in a sense, right at the other end of the scale. VHF is high fidelity broadcasting — radio for the connoisseur — able to ofFer something approaching perfection in listening to the individual who is prepared to cultivate the medium and to devote his attention to it in some of his leisure hours. VHF transmission of all three sound services now blankets the country. Nearly 99 per cent of the population is within reach of VHF, and about five million VHF sets are in use.

In a way these technical developments divide the audience, and such broad divisions are going to be important considerations for the future. The demands of the transistor-listener are likely to vary considerably from those of the VHF listener. The millions who look to radio for a pleasant background sound to ease the boredom of the routine daily chores, require a service quite different from the needs of the much smaller audience of ‘foreground’ listeners who turn to sound in a positive way and call for serious programmes to which they are prepared to give concentrated thought and attention. Again, it is often suggested that because television is now so widespread, sound should leave light entertainment, say, or drama, entirely to the visual medium. But this argument ignores the just claims of around five million people who for one reason or another are still entirely dependent on radio. In the television household, sound is inevitably a complementary medium. In the sound-only home, radio must continue to provide the full programme range.

So BBC sound broadcasting in 1964 will be shaped with all these complex considerations in mind. We shall try to serve our big battalions faithfully. Our minorities will still be cherished. Our aim will be to use our three channels even more effectively than before to satisfy the ever-widening range of programme requirements. But these good intentions could truthfully be set down about any year. What makes 1964 special is the hope that, if negotiations in progress at the time of writing succeed, it will see an increase of sound broadcasting time each week by as much as one-third.

During 1964, if our plans mature, we shall extend the Light Programme’s day by three hours, starting earlier and finishing later. Meanwhile, we hope to introduce on the third channel a regular service of serious music, running right through the day until early evening when the Third Network will take over. This filling-in of the sound broadcasting pattern, if it can be achieved, will provide the British listener with a range of programme choice unrivalled anywhere in the world. It will be the most important radio innovation in this country since the introduction of the Home-Light-Third pattern at the end of the war, and it will indeed make 1964 a milestone year.

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Dogs, of misfortune and misunderstanding, at the heels of BBC-2 in its early days created a picture of it which was wrong, and which is only now being corrected. Some thin Italian hands, of course, were at work. Some whiffs of old grapeshot were scented from the commercial lines. It would be naive to suppose the new channel was launched into an entirely friendly world. The black-out of the first night was succeeded by the dim-out of the first few months in the hard, bright light of the finest summer for five years. Some bought new sets without realizing they needed new aerials as well. The strange new rooftop devices were thus often angry last straws. Many more, aware of this need, were frustrated by apathetic or ignorant landlords. Propagation problems were aggravated by the high blocks now so typical a part of the London, and Greater London, scene. Then there was the Seven Faces of the Week policy, pleasing to some, alienating to a majority who found some nights when they wanted to watch nothing at all. ‘So quick bright things come to confusion.’ We said we would make mistakes, and we did. But they were not all ours. There were a few programmes that were actually bad. But Michael Peacock’s scrapbooks grew fat with praise of the good and new ones. It was ironic, but galling, to read on one page of the dailies and weeklies that BBC-2 was a ‘flop’, and on another, warm critical notices of its outstanding items. Meanwhile the audiences in the South-East, many of whom escaped the sampling nets because they were outside the official fringe area of direct reception, or were being supplied by local enterprise even beyond the Home Counties, were still small, smaller than we would have wished, but deeply appreciative. Letters and telephone calls, which in the experimental stages of a new service may be more significant than scientific samples, proved that, in their hundreds and thousands.

The next stage in this comical, tragical history (and history, said Carlyle, is a distillation of rumour), was when, foolishly, as it turned out, we allowed the news of a feature film deal, in which BBC-2 was minimally concerned, to be revealed at the same time as our plans for the necessary re-shuffle of the nightly pattern. The watchdogs were loosed. Making all kinds of assumptions from an absentee position, the critics bayed. ‘One sees more devils than vast hell can hold.’ ‘From now, on, BBC-2 is on its own, so far as I am concerned’, was a favourite line among those who believed, honestly

and erroneously, that they had been betrayed in their support of the new channel. Gradually, and generously, they retreated, as they realized the alarm was false, that what was happening was a spread, and not a dilution, of the programmes which marked BBC-2 out from BBC-1 (and naturally, from ITV), that the minorities were being catered for at least as comprehensively as before, that many of the timing changes were being made, not to tuck such programmes away on the sidelines, but to present, so far as possible, an array of common junctions with BBC-1. This could not, of course, eliminate the agony of choice, but at least it reduced the unfairness of it. Anyway, it quickly became clear that the UHF viewer liked the new plan, and began to watch something every night. This meant that many of the more unusual programmes got a better chance of a spill-over audience. It was an all-round improvement. Seven faces became seven days.

As we expected, with the coming of autumn, and the disengagement from elections and athletics, the number of UHF sets and the volume of BBC-2 viewing in the South-east grew appreciably. But it was undoubtedly the unexpected acceleration of coverage for Birmingham which gave the second channel the fillip it needed. ‘BBC-2 Showcase’ on Sunday afternoons on BBC-1 whetted appetites as it was intended it should. The press in the Midlands displayed a daily interest even before the transmitter was open. The industry, in all its parts, became more and more confident of disposing of sets. First reactions in the Birmingham public were friendly, positive, and contained a certain robust contempt for people in the South who took a long time to know a good thing when they saw it.

‘Midland furze afire —
Buy my English posies,
And I’ll sell your heart’s desire.’

Perhaps ‘heart’s desire’ pitches it a bit high. Nevertheless, in terms of programmes accomplished, sometimes by the rawest recruits, sometimes by older people drawn into new effort and new imagination, the first nine months were more than pregnant; they were a new birth. Thinking back to the very large and unexpected range of musical programmes, for instance, or to the breakthrough into the ‘new leisure’ by ‘Time Out,’ or to ‘Theatre 625,’ which was, ‘seminally’ to be in the word fashion, at least as important as anything happening in that time at the Aldwych or the Arts or the Court, or to the various kinds of interrogation in depth for politics or science, or to the acceptance of ‘Tuesday Term’ as a start in re-education which is now a national issue, or above all to what is already a worldwide as well as a national impact of ‘The Great War,’ thinking back to these things seen, by those who have BBC-2,1 would be prepared to match myself against Bacon: ‘A crowd is not company, faces are but a gallery of pictures, talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.’ If we still have less than a crowd for BBC-2, there is a company and an enlarging one; faces are increasingly alive; talk is more than percussion. Love, in terms of eager, professional skill, is being lavished on our company. Enough of statistics, for this book; they are the ghoul, anyway, at any programme feast. Poetry is of graver import than history. We have Aristotle’s word for it. At this moment, I am more concerned with the poetry of BBC-2 than with its history.

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Before a new network can be engineered, the standards and the channels to be used must be known. When both of these are new, as is the present case, the engineering problems are intensified. Many years ago preparatory work started in the examination of the problems of 625-line picture generation, recording, distribution, and transmission. Much of the studio equipment installed in recent years for the existing 405-line programme has been made suitable for operation on the new standard as well, while other equipment has been made so that it can be fairly readily converted.

In the transmitter field the characteristics of UHF are very different from those of VHF. The signals required are more intense while the falling-off of the signals with distance is increased. Moreover, shadow effects of hills and other obstructions are very marked. The result of this is that more than three times as many transmitters will be required to give coverage in UHF as are required in VHF, while the power radiated by each transmitter must also be much greater. Further, to reduce the shadow effects higher masts must be used. When we add to all this the requirement that, while not initially called on to transmit colour signals, all the equipment must be such that it can be readily added to or adapted in order to make such transmissions, it will be seen that the complexity and cost of the new network is necessarily very high.

The starting point in planning the transmitter network is to carry out propagation measurements across different types of terrain, including sea-paths from the continent, in order to find out exactly how many stations will be wanted, what should be their power, location, aerial height, and so on. This has now been completed for the first group of stations, and building work on these stations is in progress. The first transmitter is already in experimental operation and comes into regular service in April 1964. The others follow at intervals.

For many years past we have been taking steps to reduce the manpower required for routine transmitter operation. In view of the large number of transmitters involved, the need to economize in manpower is all the more apparent, and we are planning these UHF stations to operate with the minimum supervision. Automatic devices are being used to the full.

Those BBC studios not yet capable of operating on 625 lines are being modified to enable programmes to be so produced, and in the future all BBC studios and the associated recording facilities will be capable of operating on both 405 lines and 625 lines. Because of programme exchange with North America some facilities are also provided for the 525-line system. The programme links between the studios and the transmitters are being engineered for 625 lines and the construction programme for the distribution network, which is carried out by the Post Office, must be co-ordinated with the construction of the transmitting stations.

Greater precision is needed when transmitting colour pictures as deficiencies in transmission which would cause only small errors in a black and white picture cause much more serious errors in a colour picture. Moreover, the situation is complicated by the fact that at the present time it has not been decided what colour system should be used. The engineering must therefore be on the basis of making provision for whichever may be the most exacting of the systems under consideration. Possibly a decision on the colour system will have been taken before the entry into service of all the facilities and it may then be possible to relax some of the present requirements.

The construction of a new network not only brings with it the problem of finding a large number of men to carry out the design and installation work involved, but also of course to operate the new facilities. Some hundreds of additional staff are required. Naturally, these men are not available already trained in the new techniques and, although many of them will have very good experience on 405-line techniques, it is essential that they should be trained in the techniques applicable to 625-line black-and-white operation and begin to be trained for 625-line colour operation. This has added to the training problem and has necessitated an increase in BBC training facilities.

The engineering of such a network involves very large sums of money, and careful balancing of the amount of money available between the various facilities required for programme origination, distribution, and transmission. The availability of money and the engineering effort to spend the money puts a very definite limitation on the rate at which a second network can be expanded. Fortunately, although a very large number of transmitters is required to give complete coverage, a fairly small proportion of these gives the greater part of the coverage, and as has already been announced the second programme should be available to 75 per cent of the population by 1966-7.

The standards laid down for 405-line television more than twenty-five years ago still apply and give very good pictures. We have to ensure that the engineering going into the new network is at least as good, since the 625-line system, which will probably last for an indefinite time, is expected to give even better results.

The post Engineering of the new network appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

Prediction in television is a dangerous game. Already since we began talking about a second channel nearly three years ago (which was before Pilkington had reported, and the Government had given the BBC the go-ahead, so that what we then had was a case, to persuade, and not a plan, to propound) my colleagues and I have had to alter our proposals considerably, and more than once. Much even of that part of them which we thought safe to make public has been overtaken, by changes of date for starting up, of the progress of coverage across the country, and perhaps most importantly of all, of programme thinking in a medium so unpredictably fluid and fast moving that yesterday’s good idea seems inadequate today, and impossibly old fashioned tomorrow.

Even now, with the opening night really imminent, I have in front of me the second master plan from Michael Peacock, whose exciting responsibility BBC-2 is, and this is, he warns, still likely to be no more than a rehearsal, on paper, of what eventually will happen. (I am also acutely conscious, as I write, that before this Handbook has ceased its annual validity, that eventuality will have been an accomplished fact for months!) Now there is nothing surprising about such changes in tactics. In fact, they are inevitable for a number of reasons. We have been, and shall be throughout 1964 and afterwards, very dependent on the prompt delivery of a vast range of new equipment, and the keeping to time-table of all kinds of construction, from studios and offices to cutting rooms and warehouses. This is the technical problem.

We are equally dependent on the success of the people we have taken on, who are being assimilated into the general productive capacity of BBC Television as a whole, so that two services can be maintained instead of one, and half as many hours again of new programmes can reach the screen. We are heavily dependent, again, on the flexibility and efficiency of our training schemes, for while a few experts have moved across from the commercial companies, most of the recruits are young, and new to television, and incidentally, must be given, so far as possible, a run on the nursery slopes. About a thousand newcomers, in all classes of output, production assistants, floor managers, designers, costume and make-up assistants, film editors, cameramen, and every category of technician, constitute a formidable ‘citizen army’ who must be made ready to play their full role in the field. This is the human problem.

Having reached the UHF 625-line screen, it must be with something that looks, taking not only a week as a whole, but any one evening, new, and lively, and different, something which will have an appeal for large groups of viewers, and for smaller groups as well, and something which takes off from the point of technical sophistication and programme maturity already reached by BBC-1. This is the professional problem.

No one television organization has ever been asked to do this before. It is an entirely different situation from the setting up of an alternative system, as happened when commercial television came into being in this country, and was based on a substantial diversion of qualified personnel from the BBC. It is altogether different again from starting television in simple circumstances for an audience to whom it is a complete novelty, which is the condition confronting many of our brothers in the Commonwealth, and indeed in the emergent countries everywhere. Here you have the oldest television system in the world, with all the standards and models and examples it likes to think it has set for other television people in Britain and elsewhere, being called upon to begin again by improving on its current performance, because if it does not appear to be doing that, the public wrath will fall, and the Government’s confidence in the BBC will be shaken.

In other words, BBC-2 is not starting from scratch, but under the handicap of existing liveliness and variety in BBC-1, and the rapidly improving form of much commercial competition as well. This is a challenge we accept and we believe we can meet. But it does not mean that given a successful start in the South-East in 1964, this will be adequate for the Midlands and North in 1965, or for the further very important extensions, in particular to the other nations of the United Kingdom. We shall refuse to be content with whatever pattern emerges in the first year. I believe that viewers in 1964 (who, after all, do comprise one-fifth of the population, if they are properly converted), will discover that the freedom explicit in two channels quickly becomes so natural, so inevitable, that they will wonder how they were ever satisfied with anything less. But they must not suppose that they can settle down into a mere extension of the viewing routine which emerges from the ‘either/or’ situation. BBC-2 will not stay put (any more, of course than BBC-1 will). It will be continuingly, perhaps indefinitely, experimental. Release from a strait-jacket can have a permanently invigorating effect.

The post Strait-jackets are no longer being worn appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

It doesn’t look subtle to modern eyes, but there are a couple of subtle tugs built into this advert.

For a start, the housewife doesn’t look frazzled, as she would on television until introduced to the product. Instead she’s in mod clothes, with her freshly set mod hair, looking relaxed and happy as she does her chores.

The addition of the skipping girl attaches to the ‘that means germ-free!’ tag line, reminding the reader that it doesn’t do just to have everything looking clean: it must be sterilised if you have children in order to protect them.

The text subtly reminds us to buy two bottles one for the lav and one for the kitchen. Why can’t one bottle be used in both places? Well, it suits Lever Brothers better if you buy two, obviously. But also, it subtly implies, the germs are different in the kitchen and the bathroom. Don’t let the two mix. You need two bottles.

The final tug is the last image, the housewife with her bottle of Domestos, looking for all the world like she’s going to drink it. This product has a nice smell, it hints, even though it doesn’t. You’ll enjoy using it, it presents, even though you won’t. And it’s safe around children, it shows, even though it isn’t. All very subtle.

Meanwhile, a bottle is only one shilling and threepence, is glass, and you’ll get twopence back if you return the bottle to the grocer you bought if from. Since lorries arrive full from the depot at a modern supermarket and leave to return empty, one would think that this old system to reduce waste would be easier now than it was in 1964. Apparently not.

The post More than clean – Domestos clean! 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.

“As free as this. People who go their own way get National. The choice of one motorist in every seven. So go all the way. Go your own way. Get National.”

The post National petrol appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

When Sir Alec Douglas Home became prime minster, he made a self-depreciating joke that he worked out the nation’s finances using matchsticks. His reputation never really recovered.

Labour, under its new, dynamic, ‘young’ leader Harold Wilson, made a big play on how the PM was out of touch. Labour, he said, wouldn’t use matchsticks: we’ll ask a scientist to use a computer for such things. The white heat of technology would sort out Britain’s problems.

The public really warmed to this idea. Technology, automation, computers – they were things of the future and they were happening now. Scientists, the guys (for it was always guys) behind these innovations, knew more and knew how to find out more stuff. Advertisers leapt on this concept.

Washing powder adverts ceased to show a man in a suit explaining the benefits of the new Whizzo brand to a frazzled housewife. Instead, the actor donned a white coat and explained that the benefits of the new Whizzo were due to science. All manner of other products donned this scientific mantle, with everything from bread (our bread is lighter due to science!) to central heating (our boilers are more efficient due to science!) getting a man in a white coat to explain how wonderfully scientific each product was.

Here, featuring the frazzled housewife, the man in a white coat and a series of scientific-looking diagrams, Gibbs uses science to explain why you should switch to their scientifically proven scientific toothpaste with the scientific addition of science-based fluoride.

The post Toothpastes are all the same… appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

A little public information film, run during advertisement breaks on ATV Midlands and Granada in the mid-60s, reminding people to Keep Britain Tidy.

The post Keep Britain Tidy appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

Memory fails us: we don’t remember what the new mystery flavour turned out to be. Do you?

The post Spangles mystery flavour contest appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

Despite the official disapproval of Radio Luxembourg, government quangos had no problem placing adverts with the Grand Duchy’s international radio station. Here the Milk Marketing Board urges us to never bicker with a vicar but drinka pinta quencha thirst.

The post Drinka pinta milka day appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

Automatic washing machines are a new thing. Most people have a twin tub – a top-loading washing machine paired with a spin drier, which you wheeled out of storage, connected to the tap and put a bucked under the outflow to collect the dirty water. Many others were still using the technology of the Victorian era, boiling water on the stove and washing the clothes in a large bucket or tin bath, then putting them through a mangle to get the excess water out.

Therefore, rather than boasting about what Hotpoint automatic washers can do versus other brands, this advert has to tell the housewife why she should move away from the twin tub or the mangle in the first place. And explain the concept of an automatic washing machine as well.

Note that they show the top-loading automatic in a fitted kitchen, but the text refers to it being on rollers – most people do not have fitted kitchens and buyers of automatic washing machines are still unlikely to have them plumbed in – they will still be wheeled out, attached to the tap, and wheeled back out of the way when the washing is done.

The post New Hotpoint automatic appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

From the mid-1960s, your Saturday Night Suit is by John Collier, says Radio Luxembourg.

The post The Saturday night suit by John Collier appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

What’s most notable about this advert is that it catches British Railways halfway on its journey to becoming British Rail in 1965. The trading name of the organisation is still British Railways and hasn’t been truncated yet, and the double-headed arrow hasn’t been introduced. But the Rail Alphabet typeface has arrived. It was first tested at Liverpool Street in London, and the process for changing all signage began in 1965.

However, British Rail decided that signs would only be replaced as and when they had life expired – fallen off, become illegible or as part of a bigger upgrade. The last of the British Railways ‘totem’ station signs were not replaced until the 1980s.

The post Enjoy a British Railways mini-holiday appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

A fantastic earworm for Fairy Snow from the 1960s with Craig Douglas and the Mike Sammes Singers. Unusual for having Craig Douglas narrating and breaking out into song.

The post It gets white to the heart of the wash! 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.

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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!

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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.”

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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.

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