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.

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.

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.

The post More than a Tinkling Cymbal appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

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.

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