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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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