Syndicated to newspapers on 27 April 1968

MR. PAUL FOX was made Controller of Programmes of BBC-1 on June 18, 1967.

In his new post Mr. Fox has something like £15m. [£223m in today’s money allowing for inflation – Ed] to spend. He is responsible for putting out more TV programmes than any other organisation in the world, and he supervises the production of more hours of entertainment than Lew Grade, Sidney Bernstein, the Boulting Brothers, Darryl Zanurk, J. Arthur Rank and Sir Philip Warter all put together.

What qualifications has he for such a formidable task? He was editor of BBC’s Sportsview for six years, until 1961. He edited Panorama and was head of BBC Current Affairs. Thus, his background has largely been concentrated on sports and news.

When he was appointed, Mr. Fox modestly claimed that his personal influence on BBC-1’s programme schedules would not be much in evidence before sometime in 1968.

Philosophy

He has now had 10 months to assert himself, and I think it is fair to appraise the trends in programming he appears to have set in motion.

Such comments of Mr. Fox’s that I have seen reported would seem to show that the acquisition of viewers plays an exceedingly prominent part in his philosophy of broadcasting.

Soon after he took over he indicated that be would give the ITV a much tougher battle for viewers, and last December, be was concerned about the audience ratio of 60-40 which the commercial channel had in their favour on Sunday nights.

To correct this dire state of affairs, he offered the British public a peak-time fare which began with the Smothers Brothers followed by Dr. Finlay’s Casebook, and ended with a long, feature film.

Since the Smothers Brothers were a disastrous flop, it must be assumed that Mr. Fox’s much-hoped for switch of viewers did not take place.

There has been some more schedule juggling, and BBC-1 now offers us on Sunday night — to woo us away from Channel 9’s delectable treat of The Saint (a repeat), The Big Show (variety) and a feature film – The Andy Williams Show, The First Lady (a series about a female councillor) and a feature film.

The end result of this fierce competitiveness is that there are only a marginal difference in quality of programme between the two major channels and that any discriminating viewer will be driven to the nearest pub or book.

Not content with turning the week-end into a battlefield for ignorant insensitive and complacent scalps, Mr Fox has apparently turned his diligent drive tor viewers to the week-days as well.

It you eliminate the daily 24 Hours programme from BBC-1 (which has a rough equivalent on the commercial channel with the News at Ten), there is practically nothing to choose between BBC-1 and ITV as far as the aim, tone quality and spirit of their programmes is concerned.

Monday’s schedule offered us Z-Cars, The Dick Emery Show, Panorama, Professional Boxing, Dance Date. To-night you have The Virginian, Mum’s Boys, The Wednesday Play (a repeat) and the European Cup. On Friday it’s A Spoonful of Sugar, The Newcomers, Man from UNCLE, Comedy Playhouse, Miss England and Tennis.

Bland

There are 28 hours of peak-time viewing on BBC-1 every weeks (ie, 6-30 pm to 10-30 pm) and, excluding the news and 24 Hours, the proportion of time devoted to what I might loosely call “non-entertainment” programmes (ie, drama, ballet, opera, documentaries, discussions, music, art, social and political comment) is about four hours per week.

In other words, for its mass viewing audiences BBC-1 now feels that 80 pc of its prime time should be devoted to bland, innocuous, unconcerned, uninvolved, soporific, uninformative, desensitising programmes.

Its tendency to move serious programmes to off-peak hours — which has always been the policy of the commercial channel — shows that there will soon be no difference at all between BBC-1 and ITV.

Since Mr. Fox has taken over we have seen the disappearance of the satire snows, the end of controversial comedies like Till Death Us Do Part, more a conventional plays into The Wednesday Play slot and an annual schedule which boasts of 1,000 hours of sport, or almost 25 per cent of its total output.

What seems to be happening is that BBC-1, like commercial TV, is opting out of a responsible position in shaping the taste, values and aspirations of the British public and is contenting itself with playing the role of a national yo-yo.

Deterioration

Its hierarchy can probably rationalise this position by claiming that BBC-2 can offer the more discriminating and more sensitive viewer all the serious, cultural, non-entertainment programmes programmes they want.

One can even envisage that when BBC-2 becomes more popular — when it shares a larger proportion of the audience — it, too, will deem it necessary to cater for bigger and bigger audiences, like its rivals, and eventually succumb to the temptation to become just floss and froth on the fabric of our national life.

This deterioration in the impact and power of TV is just what those with vested interests in the status quo would like.

Politicians, establishment figures, groups opposed to change and reform, have watched with a baleful eye the increasing intrusion of TV in their domains of influence and power.

Nothing would please them better than the cutting back of this involvement of TV in the central issues of our time. And the best way to do it is, of course, to turn the medium into visual chewing gum; innocuous waffle; soporific pap unworthy of the attention of those seriously concerned with our affairs. This has almost been achieved in America.

But TV is, for good or ill, a medium more powerful than any that exists in society to-day. It becomes the duty of those who run it to refuse to have it converted into a national bubble-bath. They must claw, fight, scream and shout for the right to be responsible and involved.

Serious

The BBC — because it is a national institution financed by the people’s money — must always be at least as serious as a popular newspaper. There is not a popular newspaper in the land that does not devote at least 40 per cent its non-commercial space to a discussion of the serious, demanding and involved aspects of the day. And in prominent places like its front page!

If TV is used by governments and those in authority as a new opium for the masses; if it portrays a bland, reassuring, comforting picture of life; if it is not used properly as an outlet for all the doubts, arguments, controversies and fears that rage through our lives, then watch for the explosion when disillusion sets in.

Some of the violence and anger of Negro rioters in America has been attributed to the contrast between the miserable reality of their existence and the chummy, benevolent, affluent, fictitious picture of American life seen on the small screed.

Similarly, the German students have been rioting because they claim that not only the Springer Press, but TV as well has provided the people with a false illusion of what is going on about them.

Mr. Paul Fox and Lord Hill, who joined the BBC as its chairman, have responsibilities towards the British public which, at the moment, they show few signs of either understanding or grasping.

The post A sad, sad look at the sad, sad decline of BBC-1 appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

WHEN Labour came to power in October, 1964, British TV faced a number of outstanding problems. Ever an optimist, I envisaged a TV millennium.

“The appointment of young and vigorous Anthony Wedgwood-Benn as the new Postmaster-General should presage some bold and exciting developments in British TV,” I wrote at the time.

Having outlined some of the issues I confidently expected Mr. Benn to tackle, I ended my article, addressed to him, with the following euphoric peroration: “The time has come for a positive lead from the Postmaster-General for more diversified, more significant and more adventurous TV. Will you give it?”

At the time, the future development and expansion of TV was harassed and beclouded by a host of unanswered questions. They hung over the medium like life in one of those TV commercials a minute before taking an aspirin.

Problem

The most pressing problems included the raising of the TV licence fee, the introduction of colour, the possibility of a fourth channel, the structure of commercial TV, the University of the Air, Pay TV.

Supplementary issues which might have been influenced by a dynamic and concerned Postmaster-General were the extension of broadcasting hours, a determination to prevent excessive profits being made out of a monopoly situation, an insistence that money made out of TV should be ploughed back into the medium, and the encouragement of the production of TV programmes for export.

Well, three and a half years have come and gone.

Wedgwood Benn has come and gone. Mr. Edward Short, his success as Postmaster-General, has come and gone. Mr. Roy Mason, the third Labour custodian of our TV destiny is now in charge.

What has been accomplished? After almost four years of Labour Government only two significant changes have taken place. We have colour and three new programme companies will soon be performing on Channel 9.

On the other hand, the litany of “no changes” sounds like a particularly depressing long moan. The BBC has not received an increased licence fee. There is no possibility of a fourth channel during the life of this Government.

There will be no University of the Air. Nothing has been done about pay TV except to allow an experiment to go ahead that had already been decided upon by the Tories.

There has been no increase in broadcasting hours. Nothing has been done to prevent exorbitant profits being made by those lucky enough to get commercial TV contracts. Nothing has been done to stimulate the production of TV programmes tor export. No steps have been taken to see that money made in TV stays in it.

With this desert of negative achievements to inspire him, it is perhaps not surprising that Mr. Roy Mason, our latest Postmaster-General, should early on indicate that he, too, intends to adopt the administrative philosophy that in broadcasting the less done the better.

Although he has only had the job tor a fortnight or so, his performance last week in answering questions in the Commons about broadcasting shows that the obscurantist mantle of his predecessors sits very naturally on his shoulders.

Abrupt

He was asked nine questions and to each one of them he managed to say no; he couldn’t promise; he couldn’t comment; or he didn’t intend to do anything.

Now if these questions had been asked for purely party provocative or petty purposes, one might have understood and forgiven Mr. Mason’s stonewalling demonstration.

But some of them seemed to me to raise important issues that deserved more than a dismissive reply.

He was asked by Mr. Hugh Jenkins if he would introduce legislation that could enable him to require the ITA to withdraw the licence of any programme company whose control was materially changed by acquisition or merger.

When Mr. Jenkins received an abrupt “no” to his question, he pressed on with a supplementary suggestion that since these contracts were in many cases licences to print money wasn’t it desirable that the nature of the company to which it was given should remain the same?

In other words, if Thames TV or London Weekend or Yorkshire TV received their contracts because of the nature of the men who were going to run it and back it, shouldn’t Parliament be concerned if another group of individuals bought themselves into controlling positions after the contracts had been allotted?

A perfectly reasonable question, you would think, demanding a considered reply. There is, for example, the case of EMI, which, when it was part of a consortium trying to get the Yorkshire contract was rejected, turning up again as a possible large shareholder in Thames TV because it has bought itself into ABC Pictures, which has a major stake in Thames TV.

If it was right for EMI to be turned down by Lord Hill in Yorkshire, is it right for EMI to be accepted by Lord Bowden in London? Surely a subject that should concern the Postmaster General?

But no. Mr. Mason shrugged off the question with the cryptic remark that Mr. Jenkins was concerned about “this developing into a monopoly situation” and thought it should be referred to the President of the Board of Trade.

The post Latest in the long line of No-men! appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

Syndicated to newspapers on 24 February 1968

THE fascination at Alf Garnett, the monstrous hero of the BBC’s Till Death Us Do Part, lay in his ability to act as a distorting mirror in which we could watch our meanest attributes reflected large and ugly.

Like some boil on the back at the neck that one cannot resist stroking or touching, this social aberration demanded the nation’s attention.

Some 18 million viewers — half of Britain’s adult population — watched him weekly wallowing in the hates and fears and prejudices most of us have tucked away in some genteel niche of our psyche.

Alf’s views on coons, kikes and wags; his reflections on Labour Party politicians; his suspicion of anything new like transplant operations, his ignorant superstitions, his insensitivity to beauty, his blatant hypocrisy can be seen and heard most days in most pubs, factories and boardrooms in the land.

Aggressive

Even his conventional virtue — his faith, his patriotism, his loyalties — have all been acquired tor the wrong reasons. His religion is motivated by fear at a vengeful God; his admiration of the Queen, by snobbery; his passion for West Ham, by a need for aggressive self-fulfilment.

Fortunately, there are few of us who possess all of Alf’s bulging portmanteau of hates and prejudices. But it is only the saint among us who does not share at least one.

The difference between Alf and most of us is that he brandishes his decadent and violent ideas in the fout-mouthed linguistic setting that suited them best. He was too uncultivated and ignorant to realise that if he disguised them under a veneer of propriety, they would have been acceptable in some of our best drawing-rooms.

Perhaps the most disconcerting aspect of Alf’s existence is that he should be a member of the working-classes. Ever since Rousseau’s “noble savage,” liberal humanitarians have believed that given the right social conditions, the best in humanity would emerge from the lowest orders.

They had long ago given up the middle-classes and the aristocracy as too corrupted by self-interest to ever strive unduly for a broadening of the human spirit.

It would be expected that a Prussian Junker like Ludendorff could be described as “a man blind in spirit. He had never seen a flower bloom, never heard a bird sing, never watched the sun set.”

And it was natural that the epitome of a nation’s xenophobia, narrow-mindedness, obtuse attitudes should have been that red-fared, bloated representative of the upper middle-class, Colonel Blimp.

But the proletariat was better than that. So the Russian Revolution and the Welfare State set out to prove. Well, we know what happened in Russia.

Could it be possible that decades of literacy, universal suffrage, full employment, trade union protection and governmental paternalism could spawn a monster like Alf Garnett?

Sadly, it is only too true. The millions who laughed at Alf Garnett weekly knew only too well that it was true. And it is in reminding us how far we still have to go before any Utopian ideals about ourselves and our society can be remotely realised that Johnny Speight’s creation has succeeded in providing on TV both a chastening and enlightening experience.

No one can deny that some of the recent episodes of Till Death Us Do Part showed signs of tired flair and exhausted imagination. But even the worst ones were funnier, more stimulating and more nerve-provoking than 95 per cent. of so-called TV comedy.

The nation owes it, creator Johnny Speight, and its cast, Warren Mitchell, Dandy Nichols, Anthony Booth and Una Stubbs, a debt of gratitude.

But when a series as significant as Till Death Us Do Part leaves the air, it is important that a critic investigates the nature of its going.

Smothered

Was Alf Garnett pushed off the BBC or did he die a creative natural death? If Johnny Speight is to be believed, Alf was smothered by an artistic climate in which he could not survive.

“We have been irritated by a number of idiotic and unreasonable cuts,” he said. “The trouble has been since Lord Hill’s arrival at the BBC and I could be the victim of new policies. I would write another series for the BBC but only it this censorship was stopped.”

What evidence, then, is there that Till Death Us Do Part has gone too far in its use of unseemly language, its derision of politicians, the monarchy, foreigners, its shocking of sensibilities over such topics as religion sex and the family?

Judged by viewing figures, only a tiny fraction of the nation has been shocked enough by the Garnett family to stop looking at them.

This has by no means deterred pressure groups, like the one of which Mrs. Mary Whitehouse is secretary, from blazing away at the programme as a disgrace to the nation and a potential source of corruption.

Because in a comic discussion about the beginnings of man, the words “your bloody God” and “that rubbish, the Bible” were used, Mrs. Whitehouse’s association has demanded that the BBC be prosecuted for blasphemy.

In the event of a prosecution, would Mrs. Mary Whitehouse or the BBC be right as to what shocks and disturbs the nation?

The BBC in its Talkback programme, has provided some evidence of where viewers stand on programmes that its critics claim go too far in the way of permissiveness about language and taboo subjects.

An audience of 100, scientifically selected from the London Area by an independent firm, represents a statistical sample of the population by age, class, sex and earning power.

On the right of TV to upset and occasionally offend the nation, 80 per cent. agreed that it had that right. Did Alf Garnett stimulate racial prejudice? Ninety-five per cent said No. Were references to the Queen by Alf Garnett offensive? Ninety-seven per cent, said No. Was there a need for an independent viewers’ council? Ninety-two per cent said No.

These statistics, then, would seem to put paid to Mrs. Whitehouse’s constant claim that her body represents a majority, or even a substantial, number of viewers.

An incidental aspect of this affair is the fact that so many commentators have assumed that Lord Hill’s presence at the BBC has been responsible for this new censorious atmosphere. It may not be true — Lord Hill should let us know — but when Prime Ministers appoint politicians to be overseers of our beliefs and morals, suspicions will always be there.

The post Viewers, the fact is you were looking at yourselves appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

IN A TWO-PAGE ADVERTISEMENT in the American show-biz magazine “Variety,” Rediffusion trumpeted its 10 years of achievement in Independent TV.

“There must be something special about the work we do,” the advertisement read. “Like Around the Beatles, This Week, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Crime and Punishment, Freedom Road, Riviera Police.”

Since Rediffusion has lined it with Shakespeare and Dostojevski as amongst its finest hours, it is clear that the London TV company is very proud of its series, Riviera Police.

Now it is clear that the vast majority of sensitive and intelligent critical opinion in Britain does not share Rediffusion’s enthusiasm for Riviera Police.

It has had an even worse critical reception than Groucho – Rediffusion’s other recent major light entertainment show – and when one has said that one has about plumbed the depths of pejorative language.

One critic called it “decadent, trashy entertainment,” and added that “everyone in it is courting contempt.”

“The Spectator” said: “This dear and nasty programme is apparently inspired by Continental Films, a publication rich in pin-ups which are a solace to tired TV executives.”

Now the name of the “Spectator” critic who penned those lines is Stuart Hood. Mr. Hood was Programme Controller at Rediffusion when the decision to make Riviera Police must have been taken.

‘Nasty’

If he thought the idea was “nasty,” theoretically it was in Mr. Hood’s power to prevent the series being made. Unless, of course, he was overruled. And there was only one man who could have overruled him – Mr. John McMillan, the general manager and present Programme Controller. Could this offer some clue to Mr. Hood’s short tenure of high office at Rediffusion?

In any case, it is clear from the “Variety” advertisement that Mr. McMillan does not share Mr. Hood’s distaste for this farrago of sun-tanned shenanigans on the beaches of the Mediterranean.

And it must be reported that Mr. McMillan certainly has numbers – if nothing else – on his side. Since it first began, Riviera Police has consistently jogged Coronation Street for the heady accolade of being No. 1 in the Tam Ratings. Why curl up with shame when that medal is being pinned to your breast?

Indeed, when I spoke to Lord Hill a fortnight ago, I asked him what he thought of a situation where critical opinion was at such wide variance with mass preference. Did he think the critics were wrong or out of touch? He tactfully dodged the question.

But in spite of Lord Hill’s reticence, it is evident that certain discreet noises emanating from the ITA indicated that the Authority was not happy with the moral tone of certain stories transmitted so early in the morning nor with the cameras creeping pre-occupation with flesh for flesh’s sake.

Blonde

I recall one early episode where a fetishist party – with girls dressed as animals so that they could waggle furry tails at the camera – occupied a good deal of the time.

A blonde sun-bathing on a piano stuffed the base of a champagne glass into her bikini top and cooed, “Fill me another, lover.” Another, removing her swim-suit, innocently gurgled: “Don’t these bikinis cut into you when they’re wet.”

The plot involved the detective being hit on the head and falling between the straddled legs of a bathing beauty. The legs were his only clue to the villains, and the rest of the film was a flurry of navels, thighs, bosoms and calves as every photogenic clue on the Riviera was carefully examined.

What a sad change, then, there is to report on one recent episode of Riviera Police.

Not a navel within whistling distance. The one bikini in view was dangled in middle-shot as if it were something ready to go to the laundry. The heroine was dressed in a one-piece black swim-suit and bosoms were so scarce that Riviera tourists authorities might well contemplate an action for defamation and loss of trade. Indeed, the most exciting garb was worn by some monks who were dragged into the plot.

Without sun-tan lotion to act as an aphrodisiac or rounded contours as a diversion, what is there to hold audiences to Riviera Police other than inertia?

The story was typically feeble and contemptuous of viewer intelligence. A woman archaeologist, madly possessive of her son, jealously murders all girls the son is interested in. She convinces the boy he has done the murders in his sleep.

Forgotten

Such details as to why the hotel authorities conspired to deny the presence of one of the murdered girls in the hotel were conveniently dumped – unexplained and forgotten.

The French accents of the cast came and went with bewildering uncertainty. The shooting was flat, the editing leaden and the dialogue crass.

Determined to cash in on the success of such sophisticated thrillers as Burke’s Law, Riviera Police seems on every count merely a bumbling, pathetic copy from its colourless four detectives – some recruited from the Dominions to make them palatable in Australia or Canada – to the dire selection of cretinous plots chosen by its editor and producer, Jordan Lawrence.

The BBC, I would suggest, deserves some share of the credit – or blame – for sending Riviera police to the top of the ratings. Since it has consistently opposed it with repeats – either Hugh and I or the Likely Lads (and both recently seen before) – it has unwittingly conspired in the creation of the canard that the British public prefers programmes like Riviera Police to anything else on TV.

But what will the ITA think – I wonder – when it is handing out its new contracts of a company that lists Riviera Police as one of the finest achievements of its 10-year-career?

The post Decadent and trashy – Is this YOUR view of Riviera Police appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

IF ANY FURTHER sign were needed of the fatigue and inertia now paralysing television it is the sudden proliferation of talk programmes.

While the eye is being increasingly neglected, the ear is assaulted and pummelled hour after hour by what one might call cauliflower TV. It leaves the ear battered, bruised and sorry for itself.

Some talk programmes like Not So [Much A Programme, More A Way Of Life] and On the Braden Beat divide equally between the eye and the ear. But The Eamonn Andrews Show, Three After Six, The Explorers, Division, Take It Or Leave It, Dateline, and, naturally, The Epilogue, are basically radio shows that make only peripheral use of the visual medium.

Dinosaurs

These dinosaurs of TV could have made their appearance on radio in the mid-thirties with hardly a change of format or script. In the pioneer days of TV they would have been dismissed by any progressive producer as a retrogressive admission of defeat.

But their appeal to TV board rooms and planning executives is obvious. Cauliflower TV often gets a favourable critical reception because it usually has about it an intellectual or cultural aura. And, above all, it is cheap.

For these programmes there are no heavy costs for the sets, scripts, travel, filming, editing, or performers. University dons, journalists, writers, and politicians – the backbone of these programmes – can be paid a fraction of the cost of actors, well-known comperes, and other professional entertainers in other shows.

I would guess that Rediffusion by putting on Three After Six (three people talking to each other) instead of Here and Now (a film and taped actuality show) the company is saving money at the rate of £30,000 to £40,000 [£650,000 to £900,000 now allowing for inflation -Ed] a year. Since they get as much official acclaim for one as the other, who can blame them?

It would be foolish, of course, to contend that there was no place for some talk programmes on TV. What concerns me, as much as the misuse of the medium, is the general deterioration and lowering of intellectual standards of the conversation we hear on TV as compared with what we used to hear on radio.

Exempted from this stricture is Rediffusion’s The Explorers, in which Jack Hargreaves makes a serious attempt to probe the minds of serious men to give us some insight about their thoughts about the future.

Monday’s discussion with Professor Denis Gabor about the impact of automation on our society and the problem of leisure left me tingling with intellectual excitement and curiosity.

Boring

But what ABC’s The Eamonn Andrews Show is supposed to be doing I have not yet discovered. Entertaining people, I will no doubt be told, proving once more that the word “entertaining” is often synonymous with boring, vulgarising and embarrassing.

When it first began its guests included a sprinkling of relatively serious people like Randolph Churchill, Wolf Mankowitz and Ogden Nash. But the inability of Mr. Andrews, as compere, to sustain any serious talk and the impossibility of mixing slapstick and profundity soon led to the elimination of almost everybody but entertainers and clowns.

On Sunday the show reach its nadir to date. Representing the entertainers were Michael Mac Llammoir and Jeanette Scott, and the clowns were Michael Frayn and the Earl of Arran.

If the conversation has kept its centre of gravity concentrated on such topics as whether or not all blondes were dumb or whether humour is male of female (these subjects were touched upon), one could have dismissed the subsequent inanity as TV fodder on the same level as the ill-fated Celebrity Game.

But Mr. Andrews steered the talk into deeper channels, and this ill-assorted group found themselves talking about automation, computers, racial prejudice, patriotism and conformity.

Foreigners

From the Earl of Arran we heard that “the Irish have never produced anybody worthwhile,” that the Swiss are “mean, snobbish and smelly,” and that “wogs begin at Calais and that all foreigners are “bloody.” [sic on quote marks]

Now there will be protests from viewers about the use of the word “bloody.” I doubt if many will object to the far more xenophobic sentiments of the earl’s mind.

No one on the programme, I should add, intelligently contradicted the noble earl. To their credit, they were probably too startled to do anything but gasp.

If Lord Hill and the ITA is really concerned about television corrupting the public mind, let them stop worrying about the number of times people are kicked in the groin in thrillers and think a bit about the number of times they are concussed on the brain by programmes like the Eamonn Andrews Show.

One rule Lord Hill might seriously think about is preventing so-called funny programmes from tackling subjects too important and too delicate for their capabilities.

The ITA does not list the Eamonn Andrews Show among its “serious” programmes but it does list On the Braden Beat. The distinction is valid and proper. It is, therefore, up to the ITA to make sure that we are protected from stupidity and ignorance about significant matters merely because it is masquerading in the jester’s garb of “light entertainment.”

I had intended this week to discuss, too, the quality and standard of other examples of cauliflower TV but, because of space, it will have to wait for another time.

The post All these talk programmes – they’re getting worse appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.