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.

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.