SINCE this year began I have written 20 weekly pieces on television. Looking through them the other day to answer a reader’s letter I was surprised to find how much they concentrated on BBC programmes and how little on those seen on commercial TV.

In 1968 I have only written three columns which concerned themselves primarily with ITV programmes. Two of them dealt with the ethics of certain discussion techniques on The Frost Programme and The Eamonn Andrews Show.

Contracts

The other was an attack on the Government and the ITA for the arbitrary method by which they made certain people rich through their handouts of commercial TV contracts.

The BBC, on the other hand, has been pushed through the critical sieve with a vengeance. I have vigorously questioned its obsession with sports; its current policy of attracting viewers by plumping for peak-time mediocrity; its curious view that no more jokes about Mr. Harold Wilson should be permitted on light entertainment programmes.

The individual BBC programmes I have discussed have included At The Eleventh Hour, Dr. Barnard Faces His Critics, Talkback, Man Alive, Till Death Us Do Part, the Val Doonican and Rolf Harris shows, the Smothers Brothers, Don’t Count The Candles, Dee Time and a Spoonful of Sugar.

Now the only thing that these programmes have in common is that none of them has been consistently on TV for over three years. Even Man Alive, which is the oldest, has recently undergone a face-lift which changed much of its style and approach.

By comparison programmes on Channel 9 tend to cling to schedules like desperate limpets. It now requires on my part a fierce effort of will to switch over from the BBC to the independent network.

Circus

The general impression of the commercial channel is that of a grey, unenterprising circus where the ringmaster announces the same old acts – year after year — because there are always enough customers to fill up the tent.

Searching for a fresh idea, for a programme that hasn’t been grinding on for six years or longer, for something that isn’t an almost exact replica of a hackneyed formula, is a task that has long ago exhausted my patience.

Although the ITA has never divulged its reasons for demoting Rediffusion as a programme contractor, one of the factors that they must have considered was the tenacious manner in which they stuck to programmes like Double Your Money, Take Your Pick and No Hiding Place for something like 12 to 13 years.

Now that Thames TV has decided that it will not be taking Double Your Money after July of this year, Mr. Hughie Green has said that he is shocked that a minority of people should be able to take off a programme which is so popular with the majority.

One would think that after having had the longest run in TV — a run that has seen him mature from youth to middle-age with his grinning bon-homie as glacially intact as ever— Mr. Green would have bowed out gracefully with a few grateful words about the powers of tolerance and resignation of the British public.

Instead, Mr. Green is now arguing that, since some 6,000,000 homes still tune into his programme, that it is almost anti-social for a “minority” to take him off.

Who this “minority” might be and how they managed to get their views to Thames TV, is not explained by Mr. Green. Since decisions of this kind are usually taken by minorities of one, two or three men who control programmes in the various companies, does Mr. Green think there ought to be a “majority” of 6,000,001 executives before anyone dare drop Double Your Money?

Justified?

Ot course. Mr. Green will claim that the mere size of his audience justifies its continued existence. That is evidence of “what the public wants” — and who dare defy the will of statistics?

But if the public is offered no choice, how do we really know what it wants? If Double Your Money continues to occupy a prime slot for 13 years, how do we know that there is not a better panel or quit game in somebody’s imagination that would not be more popular than Double Your Money?

If the BBC had not taken off some very popular comedy shows, how would we ever have known that Steptoe and Son or Till Death Us Do Part would be more popular?

And has Mr. Green ever considered that stultifying effect that programmes like his, with their unchanged routines year after year, has on the creative talent that has to put them out?

And has he ever thought of what these long-running programmes do to audiences? It cocoons them in a world of routine where their ability to make an individual choice is eventually atrophied.

Conditioning minds to be unselective, undemanding and unadventurous is hardly the purpose of TV. Yet that is what its end result would be if programmes were never changed, never altered just because they were preferred by millions too lazy or mentally unequipped to do anything but enjoy what they enjoyed before.

Eamonn

Now every commercial company has had its share of programmes that have on too long for anybody’s eventual good. ATV had Emergency Ward 10. ABC looks like turning the Eamonn Andrews Show into another runner in the eternity stakes.

But the company that has displayed the most resistance to change on the commercial network is, surprisingly enough, Granada.

I say “surprisingly” because Granada has always had a reputation as an aggressive, social-conscious, vigorous programme company. It is a reputation that needs some drastic re-justifying.

Granada’s main contributions to the network include Coronation Street (over seven years old). What the Papers Say (12 years old). All Our Yesterdays (seven-and-a-half years old). University Challenge (six years old). Cinema (tour years old) and World In Action (five years old).

Individually, there is nothing much wrong with any of these programmes. They all tackle their particular subjects with reasonable professionalism and skill.

But to have any company content with a schedule in which over 80 pc of its main programmes are between four and 12 years old indicates a smugness or apathy which is somewhat disturbing.

The dynamic Sidney Bernstein who will, unbelievable as it may seem, be 70 next January, may be preparing the end of some of these hoary programmes when the new contracts are taken up in August [Actually the end of July – Ed].

Whether Mr. Bernstein will be leading his company into the new TV era remains to be seen since, according to the new 1TA regulations, all company directors must retire at the age of 70, unless there are exceptional circumstances to justify their staying.

A positive demonstration of his continuing youth and vigour would be the drastic pruning of some of the ageing programme vines that are now choking his TV schedules.

The post The dreariness of the long-distance runners appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

THE GROWING reliance of all channels on old films to fill up their contractual hours is perhaps the most insidious element depres- sing programme standards and which will eventually lead to the deterioration of all TV.

Over Whitsun BBC-1 showed four old films while ITV in London were exhibiting three. During this week we were able to see five ancient films (all at peak time) on ITV and seven on BBC-1 and BBC-2 (all but one at peak time).

Something like 18 hours will be devoted to this chewed-over fodder of the cinema-most of it in peak time-and unless Lord Hill or Sir Hugh Greene calls a halt to this practice all TV. like Pay TV, will become merely another distribution outlet for the film industry.

As if this not enough, each channel now has a programme devoted to the glorification of old films and the plugging of
new ones.

Granada’s Cinema. with the saturnine Michael Scott in the chair. seems to have lost the wit and intellectual bite it had when Derek Granger was running the programme.

Although it still comes up with some amusing and freakish film clips, there is a lazy. desultory tone about the proceedings that is merely time-wasting rather than time-enhancing.

Typical was last week’s assessment of 50 years of 20th Century Fox. This turned out to be a series film snatches Shirley Temple, Carmen Miranda, Ethel Merman, Marilyn Monroe – without any effort to assess, diagnose or evaluate the overall contribution of the company to Hollywood or discuss the pressures or influences that had determined its output. A disappointing affair.

Self-plugging

But the BBC has started a much more blatant exercise in self-plugging and humiliating abasement to the cinema industry.

This is called Film Preview and compered by the fast-talking, vitamin-crammed Philip Jenkinson. Put out at 6.30 p.m. Fridays it is nothing more than a half-hour trailer for the coming films to be seen on BBC with some uninhibited plugs for a few films soon to go on current release.

I cannot think why this programme should consist of this unholy combination of wholesale puffs for films on TV and in the cinemas, unless it is some arrangement to keep the filmmakers happy about so many rival films in the home.

But the result is that Mr. Jenkinson – who can be very knowledgeable about films – has to gush enthusiastically about every film he discusses and fill his script with lines like: “It’s crammed with great songs and wonderful dances… it’s one of the best musical numbers for a long time… who else could put so much into a number?” in the worst huckstering tradition.

Eighth-rate

For its own self-respect, I think this is a programme that the BBC must either axe or change to a more objective formula.

Of course, some of these old films are well worth seeing again. And if it was only the best of the cinema product, no one would have any cause for complaint.

But most of them were eight-rate when they were first made and a patina of dust has not made them any more appetizing.

Most of these films are about 15 years old and when they made up an occasional item on the schedule. they could obviously have no influence on the taste of the viewers.

But I can see nothing but complacency and inertia emerging from this creeping cinematic takeover of the small screen.

The presence of old films discourages TV companies from making their own programmes – they are much cheaper than an original play or series – and shrinks the already limited opportunities for creative TV talent.

It is astonishing that a Government that exhorts everyone to produce more is disinterested and gormless about the stifling of TV and its foreign currency potential.

For there can he no doubt that it is Government policy that has contributed in some measure to the danger of TV becoming a poor second cousin of the cinema trade.

A hint

Starved of funds the BBC has to resort more and more to non-creative measures to keep up their schedule and must buy old films rather than produce programmes of its own.

The commercial companies, uncertain of their future, have no guarantee that large sums spent on original production will be rewarded since they have no idea if they will be in business in a year’s time and on what terms.

And the pummelling of the audience with these old-fashioned techniques and plots is sure to further reduce that area of intelligent receptivity in the viewer and create a public even less capable of enjoying anything fresh, different or mature.

I might, incidentally, add that if Equity is seriously concerned about work for its members they would do well to make representations about this increasing use of old films and stop look making themselves silly by insisting on monopoly over the reading of nursery tales.

– Milton Shulman

The post 18 hours of old films in one week’s viewing is much too much appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

INERTIA is television’s most prevalent disease. Nothing is more likely to bring on a fit of the vapours amongst TV planners than the suggestion that a popular programme has outlived its effectiveness.

Programme paralysis is particularly virulent in commercial TV circles where it would probably need a couple of deaths or retirements in the board rooms before Coronation, Emergency Ward 10, Sunday Night at the Palladium, Double Your Money or No Hiding Place were finally tossed into their well-deserved limbos.

But the BBC, to, suffers from this reluctance to change or abandon a once-successful formula. In their case they tend to cling less to the popular shows than the programmes that give give the Corporation its image of solid, responsible, semi-intellectual respectability.

Speculation

There is much speculation these days about who will fill Stuart Hood’s vacant post as BBC’s Controller of TV Programmes. Proof of the need for some fresh mind in this job is the manner in which To-night [sic], the five-day topical magazine, has been allowed to deteriorate into a middle-class Tit-bits stuffed with incestuous techniques and in-jokes.

Although To-night has been on the air almost eight years, it reach the peak of its creative dynamism about four or five years ago. It then evolved its wry, oblique, irreverent approach to life.

It sought out with a purpose and some effectiveness some of the immoral and ludicrous aspects of British society. And in its imaginative use of film and the ranging quest of its cameras, it recognised the fact that TV is essentially a visual medium.

The quirky

But my recent viewing of To-night shows that irrelevance has been replaced by a falsetto indignation about insignificant and manufactured issues, that its spotlighting of British life is largely concentrated on the quirky and the silly and that its aim to stimulate and titillate the eye has been all but abandoned.

The unexpected was once To-night’s most endearing feature. Predictability is now its most irritating fault.

There seem to be at least three Alan Whickers on the programme and if you exchanged the beard and the Scot’s [sic] burr, who could tell whether it was Fyfe Philpot or Trevor Robertson speaking?

Metaphors

The hallmark of a To-night item is a man in a mackintosh, carrying a hand-mike, walking menacingly down an empty rural lane or across a row of suburban houses towards a camera close-up and in an apocalyptic voice saying something like (my words) “This ground on which I’m standing hides a dream… for some a dream of hope and riches… but for others it has already proved a will-of-the-wisp, a Freudian aberration, a frustrating nightmare.”

In one week such unrestrained, highly coloured metaphors have rolled over a disused lead mine, and abandoned town in Australia, a toy factory, a church in Spitalfield.

Only the picture of an Australian town vacated after the collapse of the uranium boom was worth showing. Fyfe Robertson’s attempt to find a serious social issue in an ecclesiastical decision to spend £70,000 [£1.5m today, allowing for inflation -Ed] on a beetle-infested architecturally-exciting church was contentiously forced. But perhaps it was peripherally acceptable.

There was no excuse at all for including Christopher Brasher’s two contributions from Wales. His playing about with drums was embarrassing and his enthusiasm about some disused lead and zinc mines was inexplicable and even misleading. “A few tax concessions,” he said in conclusion, “and we could be digging our own minerals and cutting our import bill.” And perhaps going bankrupt in the process?

Eccentrics

The programme, too, is plagued with eccentrics and odd inventions. Any foreigner watching it might well conclude that any attempt to drag such an odd-ball nation into the second half of the 20th century is doomed from the start.

There was the working-class home of a printer converted into a baroque, plaster-imitation of a miniature Victorian palace. There was Fyfe Robertson offering to sell us re-painted quarry locomotives for £100 [£2,500] each. There was the man who collected vintage Rolls-Royces, another chimney pots, and the fellow who was using chicken manure as a substitute for petrol.

There is, too, a ponderousness about the so-called funny items that is almost distressing. Magnus Magnusson trying to ridicule Italian politics, pretending to be lulled to sleep by an Oriental device or making up a new calendar were Teutonic and collegiate enough to have been the products of some “vitty shport” at Heidelburg University.

Dullness

It is not only prestige that the BBC is losing with this near-parody of a once-exciting programme. Its dullness and specialist appeal gives the commercial channel and opportunity to pick up its mass audiences for the night.

Double Your Money and Take Your Pick have for years made the Top Ten largely because they were pitted against To-night. Even such relatively serious programmes as All Our Yesterdays and Cinema can reach Top Ten status with To-night as its opposition.

With the BBC trying to justify a higher licence fee, this almost wilful chucking away of audiences seems either short-sighted or stupid.

What To-night desperately needs is a change of time-slot, approach and editor. Moved to 10-30 p.m., it would be more likely to pick up the kind of audiences to which it is appealing and a fresh zest and look would obviously come with its late-night atmosphere.

Obsession

It must stop living on its former glories and get rid of its obsession with the past and the eccentric. It should concentrate on the urgent, the vital and the genuine absurd. If it campaigns, it must make sure that the issue is really worth campaigning about and it must stop its present breathless, contentious, holier-than-thou approach to all God’s works and all God’s peoples.

It is obvious, on this record, that 29-year-old Derrick Amoore is hardly the Editor to take on such a renovation. Judged by To-night, he seems to be the oldest young man in the business.

The BBC might also stop to consider whether or not their current passion for youthful executives has not already gone too far.

The post Is this the root of the trouble with Tonight? appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

Pre-1904, it’s a veteran. Very grand. I’ll bet our grand-daddies never thought their snorting chariots would end up in the Brighton Run and being towed on trailers by 1967 Jaguars.

Edwardians are circa 1904-19. Almost as dignified. Roaring Twenties-type wagons (anything up to 1930) are vintage. Experts say 1923 (when you could buy a new Ford Model T ‘Tin Lizzy’ for £59) is a good year…

The latest pedigree is Post-Vintage Thoroughbreds. You don’t see many about. And I don’t expect I’ll ever see another from this angle. I’m underneath one. The 1932 two-litre, low chassis Continental Lagonda, owned and fussed over by Michael Scott, compere of Cinema.

I’ve flashed up by inter-city express train to his comer house in the fashionable “Cheshire Set” area of Bowden, 20minutes’ drive out of Manchester. This is where I found him — under the car, muttering away about a radiator leak.

I join Mike because I’m fascinated. Veterans, Edwardians, Vintage cars. What’s it all about? And, what’s the definition of a Post-Vintage Thoroughbred? Why the class consciousness?

Replies Mike: “When the depression set in in the early 30’s, car production became a bit bangerish. Only certain sports models really retained quality. And are regarded as thoroughbreds. This is one. A real lady, isn’t she?”

A sort of lady of a Lagonda. But I’m still not convinced of the appeal.

“She’s something lasting in this world of chuck-away gadgets and appliances,” says Mike. “Classic example of unsophisticated craftsmanship.”

And doesn’t the thought that they may break down constantly outweigh all the advantages and fun?

Seems not. In six years of Lagonda driving (20 miles a day to and from his studio office) he’s had to stop only once. “Was doing a dizzy 75 m.p.h. on the motorway — pre-restrictions — when there was a tremendous clang amidships,” he says. “Thought it was a shaft gone. Turned out to be a spanner dropping out through a loose floorboard!”

Mike, 34, 6ft. 2in., dark-hair streaking with grey, isn’t the arch-type, old-time motoring man. No deer-stalker, flowing moustachios, and pints-of-bitter-in-the-bar for him. He’s a member of the Vintage Sports Car Club and the Lagonda Club, but frequents them only for finding odd spares. Doesn’t race or rally. So, why use the car every day? Exhibitionism?

“No,” replies Mike. “Just the opposite. People don’t notice the driver in this sort of car. Only notice the car. Must admit. I first fell for old cars at public school because they seemed extrovert. First one I got was a Lagonda. Been in love with them ever since.”

This Lagonda does over 20 miles to the gallon (cheapest brand); has trundled Mike and family over the mountains to Italy; is good on tyres (and anyway a major company still manufactures tyres to fit old-time classifications); and with an aluminium body, doesn’t rust. And it will always be a Post-Vintage Thoroughbred.

I’ve always thought that cars attain vintage or veteran status on reaching a 40th or 50th birthday. Not so. Once a veteran, always a veteran and nothing to touch you. Never a new influx of veterans each year.

Veteran, Vintage and P.V.T. people do mix. But not a lot. Thoroughbred folk like Mike tend to think of veteran cars as show-pieces. And themselves as functional. This Lagonda is certainly functional. You can identify it simply by the crash of its gears. Gearbox is so tough to handle that the charming Mrs. Sylvia Scott (Mike met her, aptly enough, in a cinema) can’t drive it.

And talking of Cinema, Mike always keeps an eye open on old film clips for possible snips. A great yell of triumph recently from the editing room when he spotted a Lagonda like his in use during the Joan Fontaine-Cary Grant film “Suspicion.”

There’s a great collectors’ market for old cars. Few about and Americans after them all the time. Mike managed to get this Lagonda only six years ago in a swop, plus £175, for his old Rover that another collector wanted.

A great thing, the value: Veterans, Edwards, Vintages, and Thoroughbreds reverse the normal trend in car sales. They appreciate as the years go by. Today Mike reckons his Lagonda — with a respray and a general tidy up — might fetch £350-£400.

Still, old cars might be stylish. And a lot of fun. But even Michael Scott, a confirmed Lagonda man, also has a dashing mod-style sports car. Ostensibly, it’s for the wife.

But sshh. Here’s the secret. It’s the sports car that occupies his garage, while the Lagonda stands out in the Cheshire rain.

And the moral of that may be that a modern car expects cosseting. A Thoroughbred wouldn’t dream of asking for it.

The post Lanning at Large… interviews Michael Scott appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.