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 TELEVISION SERIAL – the nearest thing man has yet devised to talking opium is proliferating like an ugly weed across all channels.

Coronation Street. Crossroads. Weavers Green. The Newcomers. United. Emergency-Ward 10. Mrs. Thursday – together they add up to a massive indictment of the TV hierarchy whose collective intelligence can find nothing more imaginative with which to hook its millions of undiscriminating viewers.

It is bad enough that companies like ATV and Granada should confess to the sterility of their creative machine by clinging so desperately over the years to the formulas of Coronation Street and Emergency-Ward 10.

Tolerated

In no other country in the world is it possible to find audiences that have tolerated popular serials for so long or TV executives who have not felt ashamed that they have not been able to come up with something fresh and different after so years.

Even more worrying is the prospect that the pummelling the public have received by these long-running serials will lower their receptivity to any thing more demanding that plots and characters of an even lower standard will have to be devised in order to keep them happy.

There are signs that the present deplorable state of American TV is due to this fearful escalation in moronic taste. If a nation is brought up on a diet of pap it is not surprising that it never develops either the teeth or the stomach for something better or stronger.

Similarly, it seems, that in the serial field bad begets worse with Crossroads, Weavers Green, Mrs. Thursday and United! all aiming at targets lower than Coronation Street. The Newcomers is the only one with a slightly more ambitious standard.

It is clear that these increasing hours of drivel and gush can only have long-term deleterious effects on the creative abilities of all those writers, directors and actors who have to pump the stuff out.

But what is it doing to the nation? We are spending increasing millions on raising the educational standards of the young. And if education means anything it means, in addition to gaining knowledge, an opportunity to widen experience, to stretch imagination, to cultivate judgment, to sharpen sensitivity, to exercise observation and to stimulate energy.

Advantages

But these programmes are tugging the young in exactly the opposite direction. They shrink experience, limit imagination, blunt judgment, dull sensitivity, discourage observation and stagnate energy.

These serials are naturally favourites of TV executives because, from their standpoint, they have certain built-in advantages. Scripts, sets and actors are relatively cheaper than other forms of TV drama. And because of their innocuousness and puerility these programmes are seldom subject to the complaints of pressure groups.

But none of these factors matter if would really these programmes did not justify themselves by appearing regularly in the top echelons of TAM ratings.

How accurate, then, are the TAM ratings? For it is their guidance and inspiration that undoubtedly decide whether or not we will get more and more of the drip serials.

TAM, of course, merely contends that it is recording the sets switched on to a particular programme and not whether anyone is actually watching it or enjoying it.

Disquieting

But in America recent Senate investigations have produced some disquieting facts about this method of assessing public taste and it has been a great national joke that one adventurous public relations man, merely by finding out the names of a few of the watching panellists was able to manipulate his programmes to the top of the charts.

Some five years ago an independent investigation showed that TAM was as reliable a method of assessing the volume of viewers as had yet been devised. Since then TAM has increased the size of its viewing panels so that it claim it is even more accurate.

Yet any reasonable man must wonder about some of the statistics that TAM has recently been issuing. For example, there is decided clash of opinion between it and the BBC about who was watching which channel on election night.

At midnight the BBC claims there were three times as many viewers watching the BBC as were switched on to ITV. TAM claims that viewers watching both channels – about 3,000,000 homes – were almost equal. This is a staggering discrepancy.

Again we have the remarkable fact that the five-a-week Crossroads, easily the worst produced of the present serials, had four of its programmes in the Top Ten in one week in Border, all five in the Top Ten in Ulster and three in the Top Ten in the South West.

Yet not a single programme of Crossroads in that same week was listed amongst the Top Twenty in the National TAM ratings. Nor did it reach the Top Ten in most of the other large regions with the exception of the Midlands where two programmes made it. Now it may be that people of Ulster, Cumberland and Plymouth have lower taste standards than the rest of Britain and just prefer Crossroads most days of the week to anything else TV has to offer.

It may be, too, just a coincidence that three regions have the lowest number of people a their TAM viewing panel – 100 sets as compared to the large regions with 400 set – but surely it is a coincidence that needs some investigating.

Measurements

In America it is being suggested that TV audience measurements should be administered by a government agency. To avoid any such suggestion in this country, it is imperative that the public have absolute faith in the reliability of these figures.

Since the small screen is being flooded with more and more nonsense because it is claimed that it is what the public wants, but isn’t it about time we hear positively that is the public wants.

Five years is a long time in the changing world of public opinion measuring techniques. Isn’t time we had another independent investigation of both the BBC and TAM methods allegedly telling us what we want?

– Milton Shulman

The post The drivel and gush of the television serial 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.

It was while working on the series that Bill Simpson met a young actress who eventually became his wife — Mary Miller. They were married in July, 1965, in Scotland. Bill’s co-star, Andrew Cruickshank gave the bride away.

Barbara Mullen, who plays Janet, their housekeeper, in the series also attended the wedding. Such is the happy atmosphere which exists in a show like “Dr. Finlay’s Casebook”.

Bill Simpson was born in Ayr on September 11, 1931, and was brought up mainly in Dunure, a tiny fishing village which has been used as a location for one of the “Finlay” episodes.

Always keen on acting, he left a job as an insurance clerk to enrol at the Glasgow Drama College. So that he could pay his way through college, he took on a job as a cashier in Butlin’s Holiday Camp at Ayr during the summer. After joining a repertory company in Edinburgh he was later offered work as announcer and newsreader on Scottish Television. He intended to stay for six months to earn enough money to buy some clothes, but he stayed for two years. After joining the Citizens’ Theatre Company in Glasgow he decided he would try his luck in London. One of his earlier jobs in London was playing the part of a man who stole a bottle of milk in “Z Cars”.

It was while he was rehearsing this part that an offer came his way to test for the part of Dr. Finlay. He had an audition on a Friday and was told he would hear the result of it on Monday.

“I think that was the longest weekend I’d ever spent in my life,” he says. “But the wait was well worth it when I heard that I’d got the part.”

He admits that when he went along to the audition he did not realise he would be auditioning for the leading role of Dr. Finlay.

Today he is a major TV star. Like Dick Chamberlain and Vince Edwards, those other docs, he has also made discs. He recorded his first in 1964 — an ‘oldie’ called “I Love You for Sentimental Reasons”. He did not actually sing on the record, but recited in his warm Scottish brogue.

There must be many millions of people who have wished their own doctors looked like these favourite TV docs!

The post Why are TV Docs so popular? appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.