Wednesday 9 September opens with the same programmes as yesterday, diverting at 5pm to Granada’s Zoo Time. This programme featured Desmond Morris at one of the UK’s main zoos – London, Whipsnade and Chester. These were the days when zoos were mainly museums for showing live animals. The animals themselves were in small cages and a day out to the zoo simply involved going to see unhappy creatures in too small a confined space watching the visitors mournfully. This would change as time passed, partially because of programmes like Zoo Time being compared by viewers to Anglia’s Survival series, which showed animals in their natural habitats. As people started to find the idea of zoos-as-museums bothersome, the cages were broken out into enclosures, with much more natural environments and more space, and the zoos themselves started to specialised in endangered species and breeding in captivity, rehabilitating their image.

Desmond Morris is a zoologist who turned his scientific eye on human beings, studying our behaviour in the same way he studied animal behaviour, and used Zoo Time to specifically draw comparisons and note similarities between non-human and human animals, particularly spotting the large overlap in sociobiological behaviour between humans and other primates. The series also brought on a different expert in each episode to talk about some aspect of zoo life or biology; this week Morris talks to the head of London Zoo’s young zoologist club and brings on a child, Richard Claypole, from Mill Hill in London who has his own menagerie at home with 120 animals.

Fred Dinenage is back at 5.25 for Three Go Round, yet another hipper take on Blue Peter. The TVTimes calls this a Southern Network Production, differing from the usual plain Southern Production, yet this is not networked: Rediffusion fills the slot with Yogi Bear & Friends, an edited together string of older cartoons from Yogi, Snagglepuss and Yakky Doodle Duck. This is therefore possibly another major-minor programme swap, liable to go out on Anglia, TWW and STV as well.

Rediffusion extends the Ready Steady Go! brand into Ready Steady – Win! at 6.40 on Southern. This was a time shift for Southern, as it had shown on Monday on Rediffusion. This change displaces Granada’s otherwise networked Criss Cross Quiz, which doesn’t get a Southern time shift and is just dropped, although Southern do carry the Junior version later in the week.

There’s a general election due this year – the last one having been held in 1959 – and although it hasn’t been called yet, the parties know this and are making full use of their allotted Party Political Broadcasts. At this time these are still 15 minutes long, and have a television monopoly: they’re on BBC-1, BBC-2 and all ITV companies at the same time. The BBC’s policy is to run programmes 15 minutes late for the rest of the evening, but ITV tried to bring everything back to time, and the 9.10pm The Girls in My Life, at a mere 20 minutes, seems designed purely to fill an awkward spot. Eden Kane is also known as Richard Sarstedt, older brother to Peter and Robin. You may not know him, but if you’ve ever watched the 1990s Star Trek series, you’ll have seen him: he turns up in the background all the time through TNG, DS9, Voyager and Enterprise playing various miscellaneous non-speaking crew members.

At 9.45pm it’s 45 minutes of high culture as Granada from the North goes to… London’s West End to take in a popular revue. It’s difficult to imagine even BBC Four today doing three quarters of an hour of two people stood by a piano singing, even if they’re singing popular standards such as Mack the Knife and It Was Never You. This is certainly material to please the Independent Television Authority, although how well it did up against East Side/West Side, a CBS drama series, over on BBC-1, and part 15 of Correlli Barnett’s history series The Great War on BBC-2 is a matter of conjecture.

Notwithstanding the 15 minute Party Political Broadcast, the hourage for the week on Southern is overrunning. Therefore, some programme has to be being designated as adult education to prevent a closedown at the extraordinary early time of 11.15pm. The only contender is For Art’s Sake at 11.12pm, which gives us a 15 minute review of the arts scene in the Southern region. As ever, the definition of adult education is being stretched a bit here. Nevertheless we’re off air by 11.30pm. Rediffusion in London came on 15 minutes later than Southern and extends the day to midnight by slipping in half an hour of an ATV programme that is also pretending to be adult education – the cherishably named Edgar Lustgarten meeting people who are feeling frustrated with bureaucracy.

The post Wednesday 9 September 1964 on Southern appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

I SANG, standing under the bright finger of the spotlight in the dim little dance hall, and the screams of the girls rang in my ears.

They were screaming for me. Me. It had never happened before. I felt a kind of excitement which I afterwards had difficulty explaining in words. I was 18 and felt like King Kong.

Girls at my feet, girls all around me, girls breaking into my dressing-room… I loved it. Being truthful, I would say I’m a conceited person, but conceited was hardly a big enough word for me then.

Looking back to those days when I first appeared in public — in Tonbridge, Kent — I wince. The truth is I must have been downright objectionable. I can see myself now, swaggering around, or racing about on the motor-bike I’d bought, with my leather jacket and my guitar strapped to my back and my hair flying in the wind and my sideboards right down to my Adam’s apple.

I hope I’ve grown up since then. Conceited I still may be — but at least that conceit is tempered with a sense of humour and a sense of responsibility.

And the certainty that the screams aren’t for me but for an image… an elusive, intangible thing which doesn’t really belong either to me or the girls.

I’ve always had lots of girl-friends. But how many people would believe that I am basically shy? And that shyness made living a misery for me when I was a small boy? One reason for it was because of the way I spoke.

I was born Richard Sarstedt in Delhi, India, the son of a father who had German blood and an Irish mother. My father died when I was 12 and the family — my mother, aunt, sister and two brothers — came to England and settled in Waddon, near Croydon, in Surrey.

And I had this accent, sort of Indian. One couldn’t help acquiring it. When I started to go to school — it was co-educational — I felt very self-conscious. It made me painfully so with girls.

I remember I used to like showing off in front of girls in sport. I was a good all-rounder and it was the only way I could express my interest. I was particularly good at swimming.

It was a small school. But I didn’t dare speak to a girl until I was 15.

After that, girls began to loom large in my legend — as Beatle George Harrison would say!

When I left school I wanted to be an architect and went into an architect’s office as a tea boy. There was the girl who was the first person to tell me I could sing… the girl who pushed me into the talent contest which made it all happen and who, I think, I would have married if my career hadn’t come between us.

Then there were the two girls who were friends until the night one walked into a restaurant where I was dining the other and discovered I was dating them both. She poured the soup into her friend’s lap…

There have been other girls in my life, of course. Girls I have been genuinely fond of, girls I’ve had to be seen with for publicity, girls I’ve taken out because they were there and I was there. Girls whose faces, never mind names, don’t come to mind.

Where do I stand now? My mother looks after me well, so I’m not contemplating marriage, yet!

I am still basically shy, and fans, particularly older ones, can embarrass me. Almost always you’ll get the one girl among those who come backstage who’ll throw herself at you.

But I always think twice. As I said, I’m conceited—and that’s a help in this instance. I know these girls are only interested in the image, not me. And that makes it much easier to be sensible.

Most fans are only 12 or 13 and they promise to go away if they get your autograph. I have three or four girls who follow me all over the country.

And another 13-year-old who writes me two 10-page letters — on both sides — each week, ending up: “I love you best of anybody in the world.”

This may sound smug — but I feel a responsibility to fans like that. The ones who annoy me are the ones who scratch their names on my car or scrawl lipstick messages all over it. I’ve had to dispose of two cars because girls have made such a mess of them.

You may think a pop singer’s reputation makes girls fall at his feet? Take my word for it — it doesn’t. It could, with hundreds of girls you don’t want to know. But when, suddenly, you find a girl you really would like to know it becomes difficult… because she’s annoyed about that reputation and refuses to be added to a “list.”

Still, that’s one of the prices which must be paid. Like never being sure I can come and go peaceably from the house.

There are girls outside my home every day. They’re mostly young and just want to talk to me. But when I go to play tennis at a recreation ground nearby—though we always try and go when few people are about — it’s like Wimbledon! I don’t mind because I play a fair game of tennis.

But I’ve got knobbly knees!

The post Girls girls girls appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.