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We start the day with an hour of adult education. There were no advertisements in or between these programmes, making the viewing experience something like watching BBCtv. So why did Independent Television bother? The answer is twofold. First, it was very good politically: when MPs and the great and the good stood up to decry television in general and ITV in particular, as they did with wearisome regularity, it was very helpful to point to these educational and highbrow offerings as a way of deflecting criticism of Crossroads and Double Your Money. The second reason was to do with advertisement placement on the network.

The number of minutes each hour and each day allowed for advertising was severely limited by the Postmaster General. An hour of programmes that didn’t count towards the maximum hourage of television permitted each day but did count towards the average number of hours for calculating permitted advertisement time allowed the ITV companies to sell a couple of minutes more during peak time, which more than paid for the programmes themselves.

Another reason was to do with the post-war settlement. The people behind television had been through the Second World War and had joined the rest of the country in deciding that the nation needed drastic change once the conflict was over. This came through universal free healthcare, social security, decent affordable housing, and a new view of education as something that was a right for children and a responsibility for government. The school leaving age was progressively raised, technical colleges created to ensure that future manual workers could get qualifications and a university education became something obtained through hard work and intelligence rather than access to lots of money and who your father knew.

But what about those who had already left school? And those that had slipped through the cracks in the system? The television executives thought they could do their bit by providing programmes for anybody who wanted to learn more, even as they sat at home with 45 hours of work bearing down on them from tomorrow. And they were right: millions watched, thousands learnt and hundreds went on to do night classes or even go back to education. ITV may have benefited from the reputation boost and the income from these programmes, but it’s important to remember the genuine altruism of the executives in a time of a more communal nation state.

Transport (9.55am) From the timing of this programme, you would be forgiven for thinking that it’s going to be based on the Beeching Report of 9 months earlier. While that was undoubtedly fresh in people’s minds – especially if they were about to lose their local rail service – the programme is actually more subtle than that.

What it is actually about is teaching reasoning and explaining that political and personal decisions often require a balance to be made between two competing but mutually exclusive goals – in this case, high quality services vs low fares. Both are laudable goals. But we can’t have them together. Which should we chose? Is there a balance between these two societal goods? What appears to be a programme about rail and bus journeys is, therefore, actually a complex lesson in sociology and a window into the world of high-level decision making.

Citizenship (10.15am) The 1944 Education Act, implemented by the incoming post-war Labour Government, extended free secondary education to the masses, most of whom had previously left formal education at 14. But the method it used was becoming controversial. Each child did a series of tests at age 11, which divided them into three: the ‘gold’ children, the brain boxes, who could deal with intangibles and would go on to grammar school and thus into management positions; the ‘silver’ children, who needed solid notions, who could be taught what they needed to know for their skilled and semi-skilled apprenticeships, plus enough maths to do the shopping and enough English to write a letter in secondary schools; and the ‘iron’ children, who you couldn’t educate in such a way, who would learn to do things with their hands in the technical schools, ready for their manual jobs.

It was thought that a third of all children would go into one of the three streams, and a third of the budget would follow them. In practice, 25% of children went to grammar schools and 75% went to secondary schools – the technical schools were usually simply not built. Worse, 75% of the money went to the grammar schools and 25% to the secondaries.

The result was seen to be that most middle class children got the grammar school education they’d always got, but now for free, whilst most working class children were taught the basics en masse and thrown into the job market. The upper class children continued as they had before, in private schools. This did nothing at all for Britain’s rigid class structure: at 11 years old, children were told whether they were upper, middle or working class and that was that – there was to be no movement between the three tiers.

By 1964, there was a groundswell against this system, especially (but not exclusively) in the opposition Labour Party. They had swept the municipal elections the previous year and were now pursuing a policy of ‘comprehensivisation’ in Bristol, Manchester, Liverpool and London – creating mixed schools where all pupils would go at 11, allowing for pupils to move between streams, mix with different classes, and, most importantly, benefit from 100% of the total budget.

So why this programme? It’s not really to explain all that we’ve just said, although it did do that. Like Transport before it, it was again teaching reasoning and sociology, and again showing that decision making, especially at a high level, was about balancing competing priority and social goods: in this case, teaching children according to their needs vs teaching children according to the nation’s future needs. It also served to explain how children were being educated to their parents – this period is before Parent/Teacher Nights and report cards being sent home, an age when parents sent their children to school to be educated and simply expected that to happen without much in the way of the real-time measurement and micromanagement that is now the norm.

Mesdames, Messieurs (10.40am) The programmes companies often specialised in certain types of programmes. In schools television, Rediffusion did a lot of French teaching programmes; in adult education, ATV did the same. Most interesting was Tyne Tees, which specialised in Russian. A nice touch from the TVTimes is putting the credits of Mesdames, Messieurs in French.

Closedown (12.15pm)  Everything stops for Sunday lunch, which includes television and even the transmitters: the plugs at Winter Hill and Emley Moor being pulled and the staff going off for dinner. Meanwhile at ABC in Parrs Wood Road, Didsbury, the staff would stream out across the road to the Parrs Wood pub for a carvery and a swift half.

Headway (1.10pm)  We’re back on air for more adult education. This one is disguised as a “how to write better letters” programme, but was actually more subtle than that: it was about how to write letters, full stop. Much of the pre-Butler Act population had left school at 14, as mentioned above, and, whilst not illiterate, they were awkward with writing long pieces and had poor penmanship skills.

This programme therefore taught them how to write cursive, where to put the name and address, how to start and finish – the basics that we, educated to 16 and beyond, would now take for granted. The title ‘Headway’ originally applied to all of ABC’s adult education output, and was a series of series on different subjects, including basic cooking skills with Philip Harben.

The strand had outgrown the ‘Headway’ branding and expanded in the year since networked adult education programmes began on ITV, but the name was in the titles of the original series so was kept on as they were regularly repeated – this one being almost exactly a year old having launched the Sunday Session slot.

ABC Farming Comment (1.30pm)  We think of ABC as serving the industrialised north of England and the factory lands of the west Midlands. But their VHF transmissions went much further, with Winter Hill penetrating into the north of Wales, Emley Moor covering Lincolnshire and Lichfield reaching into Herefordshire and Worcestershire.

These areas had less population than the cities ABC also covered, but were economically important. A programme of interest to farmers sold advertising either side heavily – Monsanto, the maker of DDT, was a big customer for these slots – making it a very worthwhile programme for ABC. Despite only being 10 minutes, including the advert breaks either side, it was packed with features made by the ABC Outside Broadcasting unit during the preceding week, as well as having Stuart Seaton, founding editor of the Farmers Guardian, commenting on the latest agricultural news.

Rugby League (1.40pm)  General entertainment programming on Sundays had been restricted by the Postmaster General to not starting until 3pm. This had just been loosened to “not starting until after 2.30pm”.

This ‘after’ had bothered the ITV companies, but rather than seeking clarification, they went for 2.35pm as the start of entertainment programming. That leaves ABC with just short of an hour to fill with something that must be clearly for a minority audience.

Here they fill it with Rugby League football, the northern version of the game for men with odd-shaped balls. Thus ABC wins by showing something that’s both popular in their area but a minority pursuit in the UK as a whole, neatly sidestepping the rules.

Candid Camera (3.35pm) The Independent Television Authority loathed Candid Camera from the beginning in 1960. The first two editions were presented by Bob Monkhouse who then fled, not returning for the full run starting in 1961.

It was perceived as nasty, even cruel, with the public as victims who were being laughed at, not with. The ITA hated this, and looked for reasons to ban it. There were none, besides the Authority requiring that it saw written permission from everyone who appeared in shot to prove they were happy to be seen. But by and large they were, so that didn’t work.

Nevertheless, ABC and the TVTimes work hard here to soften the programme in the description. The public aren’t victims, they’re the stars. David Nixon, always avuncular, gives the show a soft, happy narration, encouraging us to laugh with the victims, err, stars, rather than at them.

When the format was reborn in the 1980s under the eye of Jeremy Beadle at LWT, this was taken a stage further: the victim of the prank was brought into the studio, professionally made-up, given quality clothing and treated like a true star. They appeared in their finery in a box in the corner of the screen as the prank played out, laughing at themselves and the whole scene.

It made for slightly less excruciating viewing. But only slightly.

The Littlest Hobo (5.35pm) This series was based on a 1958 US film, and ran for two seasons of 61 episodes in total. It was made in Canada in colour, being broadcast in Canada and the US in 1963, so this is a pretty recent import for ABC. The programme was revived in 1979, running for 114 episodes over six seasons.

The Sunday Break (6.15pm) Barry Westwood makes his second appearance of the day on ABC. The idea for this programme was conceived of as a way of filling the previously off-air 6.15pm to 7pm period, presented to MPs and churchmen as speaking to people who weren’t going to church anyway, people who took the 45-minute closedown as an opportunity to put on Radio Luxembourg or their collection of 45s.

People who went to church would still go to church, ABC’s argument ran, so here’s a way of reaching those that didn’t, in a format that would speak to younger people in particular. This argument worked, the closedown was abolished, and The Sunday Break appeared and immediately began to undermine the purpose it was created for.

The description says it all: this isn’t religion, despite the presence of Penry Jones as the Religious Adviser, and despite there usually being a (generally young and hip) vicar present on screen. This programme is, yet again, about sociology, this time disguised as moral questions. 1964 really was a time when everybody was a budding sociologist, with big plans for the future of the nation and the world – this fed directly into the White Heat of Technology ethos that would bring Harold Wilson’s Labour party back into power after 13 years in October.

Val Parnell’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium (8.25pm) Here we are in the last few months of The Beatles still being a British phenomena, with Beatlemania in the US coming shortly but not yet sparked off. Therefore, they’re still available to appear on the Palladium show in a way they wouldn’t be in a year’s time; just a year before, they were still to be found on Granada’s local news magazine Scene at 6.30.

Meanwhile, Alma Cogan was going in the other direction: a year before she had been too big for the Palladium; a year later she’d be lucky to get on About Anglia. Although she didn’t know it – her family decided not to tell her – she was already dying of stomach cancer. It would kill her in October 1966.

ABC Armchair Theatre (9.35pm) Women had been a power in the workforce during the recent war, but when the men came home from the front, Jill was supposed to get back in her box.

And for much of the 1950s, she did. But things were changing. Single women were now an important part of working life, if only because there was a drastic labour shortage. But married women? No, they were expected to leave their jobs after the wedding and get on with being housewives.

The world in 1964 is moving on: divorce has got easier, but what about divorced women? The ex-husband was often, but by no means always, told by the court to contribute to any child’s financial wellbeing. Divorced women, however, were expected to support themselves… but how? Employers were used to women leaving upon marriage and thus had no experience of hiring people with childcare obligations, since men never had any.

Armchair Theatre had been revolutionary since it began, showing the millions of ITV viewers such issues as ‘the colour bar’, addiction, literacy, even hinting at the ‘problem’ of homosexuality. Here Donald Churchill takes this new issue in hand: what do we do about a divorced woman with childcare responsibilities who needs money and wants to work? As an aside: why, 56 years later, is this still an issue?

Faces of Power (11.10pm) Here’s a programme with three uses. First, it’s an export sale for ATV, clearly aimed at being sold to NET, the American public broadcasting network.

Secondly, it counts for the ITA as a ‘serious’ contribution by ATV, always useful for a company permanently accused of being too lightweight and entertainment-driven.

Thirdly, it’s useful for ABC, who have had 7 hours and 25 minutes on air today with programming that counts towards their 15 hour maximum for the entire weekend. With the adult education in the morning, the OB from Headingley in the afternoon and all the religion excluded, the hours of entertainment have rapidly added up. But who wants to go off air at about 11.15pm if they can help it? Certainly not ABC. A half hour of further adult education takes them much nearer to a more useful closedown time.

Epilogue (untimed) We’ve pointed this out before elsewhere, but the epilogue ran 7 nights a week in the Midlands, across both ATV and ABC. In the North, Granada had no interest in any religious programming unless they scored a Christmas Day on a weekday, and even then the reluctance was palpable.

Therefore tonight’s epilogue is one of only two seen in the North in an average week. When they came from Aston, the vicar presenting would sometimes slip up and tell viewers what he’d be talking about tomorrow, despite not appearing on Granada.

Tonight, he’s in the North, most likely in ABC’s tiny remotely operated single camera studio on the top floor of the ABC Forum cinema on Lime Street in Liverpool. He’ll need to pull a cord to switch off the lights and camera when he leaves.

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One of the few Pilkington Committee recommendations that the ITA accepted was a request for ITV to switch from Outside Broadcasts being all sport – and all horse racing at that – to using the large fleets to present more live non-sport material happening around the UK. To help this, the Postmaster General increased the annual allowance for OBs from 250 hours a year to 300 in 1964. This all led to there being more innovation in OBs, something that had been in danger of dying out when the units were just seen as a sports service.

An example is the Morning Service on Sunday 6 September 1964. Instead of sending the OB unit to a cathedral or large church nearby last night’s football game, ATV’s OB crew (well, Rediffusion’s crew, paid for by ATV) head to Gilwell Park, the headquarters of the British scouting movement, in Epping Forest, with the service being held around the camp fire.

Another example on Southern is them coming on for cricket at 1.15pm. This isn’t the usual test match or international game that would be networked by one of the Big 4 companies. Instead, Southern cameras head out to Hambledon in Hampshire to watch The Lord’s Taverners take on the crew of HMS Mercury in a friendly amateur afternoon game. This is of pure regional interest, and perhaps even just local interest to people in Hampshire, and something ITV could do better in its federal system than the monolithic BBC even with 2 channels now at its disposal.

This is followed by something else that regional ITV did better than the BBC or the Big 4 ‘national’ ITV companies: microserving specific regional interests. Southern’s farming programme is one of many shown around ITV in roughly this slot in areas like Westward, Border and Anglia. There’s no equivalent in London for obvious reasons. ABC is the exception, having a farming slot, albeit firmly aimed at viewers in its fringes – Lincolnshire and Westmoreland – and in the broad swathe of agricultural land in the north Midlands and the south of the North region. Even then, ABC’s programme had more of a ‘national farming service’ feel – like the BBC’s farming programmes – and little of the deep understanding of regional agricultural issues the smaller ITV companies could bring.

ITV’s system of networking saw the Big 4 companies (Granada, ABC, Rediffusion, ATV) decide the schedules for primetime ITV between them, so the two or three companies on air at any one time largely kept the same programmes in the same slots. The smaller companies followed this, as it was easier and cheaper to take a ‘live’ feed from the network than to time shift with their own facilities. Where there were disagreements between the Big 4 and programmes going out in different slots or on different days – The Avengers on Sundays on ABC and Thursdays on Rediffusion, for instance – this allowed flexibility for the minor regions: they could choose which feed to take.

Such a difference of opinion existed between Granada and Rediffusion over Ready, Steady, Go! Rediffusion showed it at 7pm on Friday, timed to catch the older teenagers before they went out dancing at 8pm. Granada held it until after 10pm, waiting for the younger teenagers to come home.

Southern’s choice was to ignore either of these potential options and instead time shift RSG! in their own region… to 2.48pm on a Sunday afternoon. As to who that was supposed to target is now lost to us; more by coincidence than design it does directly compete with the off-shore ‘pirate’ pop stations that were springing up around the south coast of England at that time and targeting ITV’s younger viewers and hipper advertisers.

Weekends are full of sport and religion, neither of which count towards the daily maximum hours. Throw in some adult education, as ATV and ABC do in the early afternoon, and you’ve got a ten-hour broadcasting day. This allows for entertainment programmes to run from 2.30pm, catching a lucrative family audience. This was much to the chagrin of Rediffusion on weekdays, with little or no religion and sport – horse racing simply being a bloc in the afternoons – shutting them out from getting a family audience in front of the TV before dinnertime. For the smaller companies, and ATV in London, the Sunday afternoon slot created by all the uncounted hours of programming, was used to run repeats and burn off material they couldn’t find a place for – perhaps explaining why RSG! is here on Southern. For ABC, family audiences were always the goal, as they were great to sell to advertising agencies: get the kids to clamour Dad for a product, get Dad to give the money to Mum for it, send Mum off to the shops on Monday morning with the money and the product both fresh in her mind. For this reason, quality ABC programming is often seen in this period debuting on a Sunday afternoon. Networked on 6 September is Miss Adventure, a comedy drama vehicle for Hattie Jacques that would’ve worked well in the evening, but here is perfect for mopping up the entire family before dinner.

4.15pm sees Fireball XL5 hit Southern screens. Before the word “green” was in use in politics, the go-to word for a concern for the environment was “ecology”. Before that word, people talked about “the problems of pollution”. This was as close as most people got to worrying holistically about the sustainability of modern society. One of the surprising places where this concept is given voice is Fireball XL5. The series had a strong thread of compassion running through it, with Steve Zodiac, Venus and Professor Matthew Matic worrying about their impact on the universe, taking care not to disturb alien environments and always keeping one eye on pollution.

In today’s episode, a planet is found where mining operations have fundamentally undermined the whole globe. What can be done? The top bosses decide that disintegrating it will make for a safer galaxy. But the puppet stars take time to worry about the disintegration causing further pollution in space. And they take a trip to the surface to make sure that the planet is indeed uninhabited and uninhabitable. While there, they find a thriving civilisation to which the abandoned mine shafts are home – a new, liveable environment having been made out of a previously inhospitable one. The disintegration must therefore be stopped and the planet cared for: a bold deviation from the way things were done at the time.

The later reaches of Sunday afternoons were seen as a good place to put on films, with the perception that Dads would watch while the Mums were making dinner or supper, depending on when the main Sunday meal was eaten – it varied by class. Granada was delegated the job of buying in Hollywood films, probably on the back of their experience with the Granada Theatres chain in the south-east of England. But there were two other film companies involved in ITV, both of them also running huge national cinema chains. ABC was owned by the Associated British Picture Corporation, and therefore films on or offered to the network from ABC tended to be from the ABPC/Warner stable. Southern was part-owned (and controlled by) the Rank Organisation, so it offered films from Rank’s huge back catalogue. This Sunday across the network is 1955’s Track The Man Down, featuring singer Petula Clark. This one has probably come from ATV, with the film having been made by British Lion at Nettlefold Studios, which had been bought by Sapphire Films using ATV’s Incorporated Television Company subsidiary’s money.

In the 1950s, all television was banned for an hour on Sunday evenings by the Postmaster General to make sure it didn’t distract from people going to Evensong at their local church. ABC lobbied hard for this to be relaxed, suggesting instead that television should serve people who couldn’t go to church – people who were regular churchgoers would remain regular churchgoers, but the old, the disabled and people with childcare responsibilities were being denied a chance at getting some God-time in, and TV would bring it to them. The PMG saw sense in the late 1950s and allowed that hour to be used for religious and moral discussion, celebration and contemplation – and nothing else. ABC’s response was The Sunday Break, designed as a church youth club of the air.

Of the three heavier members of the Big 4, Rediffusion had become famous for its hard-hitting documentaries, whilst Granada had created a virtual monopoly on deep investigative journalism. ABC had a soft spot for looking at social issues, which would become all the more of interest to the public following the election in October returning a Labour government and the appointment in 1965 of the liberal reformer Roy Jenkins as Home Secretary, leading to the suspension of capital punishment, abortion and divorce reform, abolition of theatre censorship, a reduction in the voting age from 21 to 18 and the partial decriminalisation of male homosexuality. All of these subjects had been discussed across various ABC programmes in the 1960s, and this evening The Sunday Break, now more focussed on ‘morals’ than religion, turns its social reformist eye to ‘the colour bar’ – or racism as we now call it. At this point in time it was legal to incite racial hatred and refuse to serve, employ or house people of colour (that would also change under Labour, with the Race Relations Act 1965). Was this morally acceptable? The group of young people in the club discussed the matter and decided that no, it was not.

At 8.25pm the ITV network goes to Blackpool with ABC. This programme had its roots in a dispute between ABC and ATV. The two weekend companies had often descended to petty bickering over costs and scheduling, caused by one of the iniquities of the ITV setup. The original design of ITV was for competition to be the key in everything it did. It would compete with the BBC for audience, but also within itself for programmes. This, it was felt, would drive costs down whilst driving quality up. As usual, this didn’t work and ITV settled into a cosy duopoly with the BBC. The one part of the plan that did survive was how payments for programmes were allocated. The Big 4, making the majority of programmes, charged roughly two thirds of the cost to the other 3. For instance, a Rediffusion show made for £10,000 would be paid for by Rediffusion paying £4,000, Granada paying £4,000 and ATV Midlands paying £2,000 (reflecting its lower population size compared to the other two regions). As more ITV companies started broadcasting, that system remained, with the Big 4 selling each others’ programmes en bloc on to each company in an affiliate model and recouping some costs that way.

ABC and ATV London, however, was where this system failed. If ATV made a programme for £10,000, ABC had to pay £6,600 for it or come up with a replacement – not easy when ATV, Delfont, the two Grades and Val Parnell controlled virtually all the London talent between them. Making it worse was ABC’s suspicion that ATV were inflating the prices of each programme, to the point where ABC were paying four fifths or nine tenths of the cost while ATV pocketed the rest as profit. Howard Thomas and Lew Grade had stand-up arguments over this, with Grade waving invoices at Thomas to prove that costs were fair, whilst Thomas noted that the waving, and strategically placed thumbs and cigar ash, prevented him from double checking.

In 1963, the most popular light entertainment programme on ITV was Val Parnell’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium, made by ATV. The price per episode continued to climb across the year, until the show became uneconomic for ABC and they refused to pay until it was audited. ATV’s response was to threaten to withhold the programme from ABC, leaving them with an expensive hour to fill by themselves at the heart of primetime on lucrative Sunday nights, with ATV not paying in and it being unlikely that ABC’s small number of affiliated ITV regions would want to show the replacement nor pay for it.

But Howard Thomas decided that a line needed to be drawn, and that line was Blackpool Night Out. By using ABC’s own recently refurbished theatre in Blackpool, and drawing upon talent appearing in summer season in the northern holiday resorts, they could keep costs down and make sure that Delfont and the Grades couldn’t use their dominance over the London scene to intervene. The resulting show cost less than ABC had been paying ATV, drew the same sized audiences and kept the other ITV companies on side. ATV London had no choice but to show it, and to pay a third of the costs, the pound cost of which became the benchmark for similar programmes, and the Palladium show, in future.

Casebook at 10.35pm is unusual. This isn’t a TV series – it’s an Anglo-Amalgamated B-feature for use in cinemas, running as a short between the newsreel and the main feature in the days when cinema screenings were on a loop (you came in at any point and left when you reached the point that you’d come in at – a practice that was normal then but seems totally mad now). Anglo-Amalgamated were 50% owned and controlled by APBC, ABC’s parent, so these types of series came cheap for ITV. The cherishably named Edgar Lustgarten was not a famous criminologist. He was famous, but for his voiceover work (it’s him that Charles Gray is mimicking in The Rocky Horror Picture Show) and his crime novels, which were dramatic retellings of true crime stories. The series was known as The Scales of Justice when Associated-British Pathé sold it into syndication in the US.

With 7 hours allowed for general entertainment a day, ITV would be off by 11pm in accordance with the rules. To push things closer to a more natural bedtime, half an hour of adult education, not counted, gets inserted at the end of the day. As usual with adult education programmes shown late at night, it’s debatable as to whether tonight’s show, To Hell With Culture…?, is actually educational. From the description, it sounds like something London Weekend would be putting out at 9pm on Sundays in 1969, and indeed seems to be arguing for London Weekend’s failed policy of bringing arts and culture to the masses at peak times.

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