Different ITV companies specialised in different sports. If there’s swimming on ITV, it’s a solid bet that it’s TWW cameras. If there’s horse racing, the OB equipment comes from Rediffusion. And if it’s show jumping, then it’s a Southern production. Southern had a long – and mutually fruitful – relationship with the All England Jumping Course at Hickstead in Sussex and would produce programmes for the network, as here, or just for their own viewers. Either way, Raymond Brooks-Ward (1930-1992), who pioneered the idea of commentating on show jumping, was always there, on his own or with Dorian Williams. He moved to Grandstand on BBC-1 in 1982, as Southern’s successor TVS had little interest in the sport.

Small Time at 4.45pm makes use of Rediffusion’s continuity announcing team. Howard Williams, like most announcers, was an actor, with continuity being what he did when he was ‘resting’. This was a useful side job for actors who were voice trained and used to having to improvise and was more regular work than the after dinner speaking circuit. Ivan Owen, Williams’s co-performer, was also the voice of Fred Barker in the Five O’Clock Club, and provided the voice for Basil Brush opposite Rodney Bewes in the 1968 Friday evening BBC-1 series.

Day By Day is one of the longest of the daily magazine shows on ITV. This week, Monday’s edition runs to 40 minutes, Tuesday is 25 minutes, Wednesday 35 minutes, Thursday 35 minutes and today 35 minutes. Most other magazine shows at this time hover around 15 minutes, reaching 25 minutes for editions with a sports report on the end. For Southern, this creates an odd 20 minute gap between the end of Day By Day and the start of network prime time programmes at 7pm. Each day they fill it with a short local production. Today it’s the famous Out of Town with Jack Hargreaves (1911-1994). Hargreaves was the face of the station, Mr Southern, synonymous with their output. He had originally been hired by the company to be an executive, commissioning Southern productions as Assistant Programme Controller. But he was so popular in front of the camera in his first programme – Gone Fishing – that he came up against the Independent Television Authority’s rule that an individual can be an executive at a company or a star on that company… but never both. He chose to stay on screen, and continued to act as a programme controller unofficially.

The Celebrity Game at 7pm is what would evolve into NBC’s Hollywood Squares in 1965, and ATV’s Celebrity Squares in 1975. Viewers send in yes-or-no questions for the celebrities to answer, and contestants must guess – and give reasons for – what each celebrity will say. Each correct answer gains them £10 (up to the ITA’s maximum of £1,000), whilst three wrong answers in a row sends them home. Viewers sending in questions get a £1 Premium Bond if their question is used. As ever, Rediffusion is able to use its might as the backbone of ITV to pull in at least one huge star for each edition. The first show had Groucho Marx; tonight sees movie star Kenneth More answering questions.

8.25pm sees Stars and Starters. This is an frankly insane hybrid between the nightclub variety show Stars and Garters and Independent Television’s horse racing coverage team, who are here to commentate on greyhound racing from West Ham. It’s all for charity, unsurprisingly – the Variety Club of Great Britain.

ITV had no choice in the placement of Party Political Broadcasts. They could either show them when the BBC showed them, or not show them at all. And the ITA was clear: not showing them at all was really not an option. This creates problems for ITV schedulers – the BBC happily runs everything 15 minutes later than usual, but ITV like to get back on track to allow certainty for advertisers. Tonight’s placement of the Labour Party’s broadcast puts them in a really awkward position. The space between the news and the broadcast has to be filled with something, but is only 20 minutes, so Rediffusion invent a quick jazz programme. But the 12 minutes between the broadcast ending and a decent 10pm starting time is impossible to fill, so programmes until about 11.30pm have to run with a weird 8 minute offset to make up for it. However, this is only admitted to in the London TVTimes. In the Southern edition, the programme times are rounded off, so viewers are told to expect It’s a Woman’s World at 9.45pm when it actually airs at 9.48pm; Southern viewers are told to tune into Call in on Carroll at 10.40pm, but will actually have to wait 8 more minutes, until 10.48pm, for the show to actually start. And the news headlines, advertised as being at 11.10 are actually at 11.18pm. All in all, very unsatisfactory for the ITV network, the viewers and the advertisers. One wonders if the BBC did it deliberately.

Labour’s party political broadcast itself was a powerful one. The opinion polls said there was a definite swing to Labour to be seen, but it ranged from 2.75%, which gave the Conservatives a majority of 30, to 4%, giving Labour a majority of 23. An election had to happen by mid-October, so clearly there was all to play for. Labour chose the name “A New Britain” for both this broadcast and its manifesto. Both looked forward to the 1970s, and how Britain could use ‘the white heat of technology’ and Labour’s ‘new thinking’ to turn the country from the backward-looking, ageing, ‘dirty’ country it had become after 13 years of Tory rule into a forward-looking, young and bright nation ready to take on the challenges of automation, housing and education.

It was a powerful message, although it didn’t sit very well with a lot of middle Britain, who were perfectly happy for the country to plod on as it had been, since those 13 years had been ones of growth, low inflation and calm after the changes of World War II and the Attlee revolution. To try to reach those people, Labour contrasted the recently appointed Prime Minister, Alexander Frederick Douglas-Home, former 14th Earl of Home, former Lord Dunglass, Scottish landowner, Eton Old Boy, and Chamberlain’s right-hand-man during the years of appeasement before the war with the younger, hipper, working class Grammar school boy Harold Wilson. They were helped by the fact that the high contrast and ‘silver glow’ of black and white 405-line television made Home look like a very very old man – in repose, his bald head looked like a skull. In contrast, Wilson looked young and determined and was happy to try to compare himself with the late John F Kennedy.

In the end, this contrast between backward and forward, between old and young, between chugging industry and robotic automation, would swing the election for Labour – just, with a majority of 4.

Tonight’s big play, at 9.45pm (well, 9.48pm, but we’ve covered this) is by Margaret Drabble and is another of those programmes only Granada could make. 1964 is before ‘feminism’ is really a thing. There are ‘women’s libbers’ around, but they’re not much to be seen on television – they’re not even the butt of male comedian’s jokes, the peak of that would be a decade later. But subtle feminist thought is there, and finds expression in Granada’s play series It’s a Woman’s World. This play, ‘Laura’, is one of the first to address post-natal depression, then not accepted by most (male) doctors as an actual thing. It also, and this is a retrospective call, covers the absence of paternity leave rights for men: once Patricia England’s character has had her baby, her husband goes back to work, leaving her alone with a screaming child in a home in the middle of nowhere, her only contact with adult humans being with travelling salesmen – which is no better than not having any human contact at all. As always, Drabble puts suitable twist on all of this, so the main message may not have been seen by male viewers. But the play spoke directly to female viewers as she intended it to.

11.12pm is ITN’s foreign news programme. News from outside the UK was not popular with viewers; news from outside the Commonwealth and the United States was seen as audience poison. ITN’s main bulletins therefore concentrated on what was happening in the UK in particular, with trips abroad limited to later in the bulletin and firmly from English-speaking countries. But it was not possible to completely ignore world news, so ITN places it in Roving Report – perhaps something of a ghetto, but good to see anyway. This was one of the programmes that would be folded into the new News at Ten in 1967, the new programme daringly often leading with international stories and not shy of giving the back quarter hour over to one whole story filmed on location somewhere where English was not spoken.

The post Friday 11 September 1964 on Southern appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

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.