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.

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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.