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.

One of the nastiest is Alex. Lambert of The Informer, who has temporarily replaced Sergeant Lockhart of “No Hiding Place” as Rediffusion’s man with the TAM appeal.

It has been consistently high in the ratings since it first appeared some six weeks ago.

Without wanting to be over-priggish, I find the glamorisation of a stool pigeon, the romanticisation of a cheapjack Lazarus, a rather clammy device for hooking popular audiences.

If Lord Hill is seriously concerned about the corrupting influence of programmes that appear on the air before nine p.m. – the wasteland reserved for programmes not unsuitable for children – then I suggest he consider some of the moral implications of “The Informer.”

“I didn’t realise what a fascinating subject informing was until we started researching for the programme,” cooed Stella Richmond, its executive producer, in a recent interview.

If you read that sentence quickly you might have thought Miss Richmond’s bubbling enthusiasm was related to some harmless activity like shrimping, or stamp collecting, or skin diving.

It was not. She was talking about the fascination of “informing.” Selling people to the police, not because of any sense of duty or conscience or moral responsibility, but purely for money.

Handsome

And Alex. Lambert, the disbarred barrister turned copper’s nark, does very well, thank you very much, out of betrayal. He’s handsome, has a sardonic grin, lives in sumptuous surroundings, wears Saville Row suits, eats in the best restaurants, drives fast cars, has a pretty, devoted wife, is adored by a ravishing girl friend, keeps no regular hours, moves freely in artistic circles and, apparently, has no overdraft problems.

Such a life and such a hero might well warrant emulation in the young. Why not Alex. Lambert fan clubs? Membership open to all those who have reported that Mom hasn’t renewed the TV licence and that Dad has cheated on his income tax.

It is, perhaps, arguable that an originality in approach, brilliant, adult dialogue, imaginative stories with a sardonic thrust and drive, characters whose motivations are intelligently probed and portrayed, might have justified the part the informer plays in a society groping for acceptable values.

But nothing like this is remotely attempted in “The Informer.” Its routine thug-ear plots are well below the least ingenious efforts of Edgar Wallace or Peter Cheyney.

Irritating

Hardly any effort is made at plausibility and it is extremely irritating to find the script-writers blithely contemptuous of such obvious plot mechanics as the fundamental one about how Alex. Lambert gets his information in the first place.

We sometimes see him conveniently watching a rehearsal for a smash-and-grab. Or picking up a casual piece of notepaper on his girl-friend’s desk (who, incidentally, is a lady with more mysterious contacts than a supernatural octupus) which just leads him to some nefarious skulduggery.

Having saddled themselves with characters and a story-line they have no credible viability, the writers constantly slow up the action paying lip-service to the demands of continuity.

The wife, played with crunching, repetitive sincerity by Heather Sears, is ignorant of her husband’s profession and, therefore, has to put on the same look of pained surprise when he gets into bed with her regularly at four in the morning.

Her dialogue consists largely of endless permutations on the line “I don’t like sitting/standing/lying here at home/in bed twiddling my fingers” and her moods vary between flouncing anger at his curt explanations and wifely forgiveness when he takes her out to a meal.

The girl friend, who must be the most frustrated glamour girl in modern TV, can ooze sex and suggestion all over Lambert, but the minute she touches his hand or invite him along to her flat for a longer evening he scurries off too his wife. Any virile man who can do that week after week to a girl looking like Jean Marsh surely needs some serious medical advice.

Together with the enigmatic, purposeless Lambert himself – whose perpetual frown must be due to the fact that he can’t think of any fresh place in which to meet his police contact now that they have exchanged secrets in museums, steam baths, morgues, airports and gent’s lavs – they make a rum, hollow trio.

The farrago of stolen paintings, neurotic wives and Edwardian super-crooks owed much to “Danger Man” and “The Avengers” without at any time touching the authentic suspense element or the wry mocking tone of either of these series.

Although Ian Hendry plays Lambert with a nice detached coolness, and although the directorial pace sometimes glibly disguises the flaws in story and conception (I should also say that the sound quality in some of these episodes has been atrocious), its technical facility is not good enough to justify the cheap, nasty values that are glorified in the person of Alex. Lambart the informer.

The post He’s nasty and he’s a stoolpigeon yet a great many viewers like to see him appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

LOOKING back over the achievements of TV during 1965 is like studying a panoramic photograph of the moon. All is a wasteland except for occasional promising shadows which on closer examination turn out to be the Sea of Despond or the Valley of Blighted Talent.

With the exception of Winston Churchill’s funeral I cannot think of a single programme on Channel 9 during 1965 that has advanced or enlarged by an iota the art, the aims, the grasp or the potentialities of television.

In a year which might best be labelled and forgotten, as The Year That Never Was, it is clear that my annual awards will hardly be included in those annual reports which take such pride in listing the prizes won in remote and undistinguished festivals throughout the world.

BREAKTHROUGH OF THE YEAR – This undoubtedly goes to ATV who, under the tireless chivvying of Lew Grade, has finally produced British TV films that have broken into the America TV networks.

From the series The Saint, Danger Man, and the Baron (yet to be seen), it is possible that Britain could earn something in the region of 10 million dollars in the next two years.

This, for the first time, opens up the golden American market to British TV producers and, for the first time, puts TV into the posture of a significant foreign currency earner.

RASPBERRY OF THE YEAR – This award – an Op Art version of the fruit that periodically emits derisory sounds of contempt – has been tidily won by Rediffusion – the London-based TV company.

Not only was it responsible for the three programmes that received the worst critical receptions of 1965 – Groucho, The New Stars and Garters and Riviera Police – but it has confessed to a sterility and rigidity of creative ideas by its apparent inability to think of anything fresh or novel with which to replace its mouldy programme relics – Double Your Money, Take Your Pick and No Hiding Place.

Rediffusion’s board – which has persistently refused to have anyone from the programme side as one of its directors – has finally admitted, by implication, that its thinking on this matter has been wrong.

Within the past few months it has invited five new men to the board – although only three of them have actually produced programmes and it will be interesting to see what difference this will make in Rediffusion’s performance.

I cannot say that the changes announced by their programme chief, Cyril Bennett, have caused any pulses to race in TV circles.

Best Programme of the Year – The coverage of Winston Churchill’s funeral by both the BBC and ITV. This showed what could be done by outside broadcasts when talent was united for one goal, and when when money was no object. This solemn and momentous occasion was enhanced by this great record of it.

Most Noble Gesture of the Year – ITV’s decision broadcast, entirety, the BBC’s obituary of Richard Dimbleby. This was a most fitting tribute to one of broadcasting’s great personalities. The fact that ITV recognised in this way the achievement of the man who symbolised, more than anyone else, their greatest rival, displayed an adult and becoming sense sense of judgment.

The post In a TV year That Never Was these were my worst programmes 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.

POP records are not only big business but a social phenomenon. There is little doubt that they are making a discernible impact in the shaping of the new Britain.

From being the squarest nation in Europe we are fast becoming the coolest. Foreigners familiar with the Britain of Victor Silvester and hunt balls are staggered by the transformation they find in the dancing seen in jazz clubs and discotheques.

The grace, the rhythm, the abandon – not to mention the improvement in the looks of the girls – have that sophisticated natural quality that one used to associate only with the more exclusive haunts in Paris, Manhattan and St. Tropez.

Barriers

More important, that ease and lack of restraint has begun to manifest itself in certain social side-effects among the young.

Class and racial barriers erode much more quicker when peers’ daughters swing unselfconsciously with lorry drivers and Negro musicians.

The innate rivalry of the dance floor has created a heightened awareness of such status ornaments as hair styles, smart clothes and make-up.

The time-consuming demands of the pop craze has so canalised their energies that relatively few of them display much interest in politics, social problems or even hobbies.

The intimacy of their surroundings and the encouragement of physical abandon has also inevitably resulted in a freeing and liberalising of sexual inhibitions.

But is all this any different from the twenties, when teenagers were swaying to the Charleston and the Black Bottom? It is all a question of degree and I think that at the moment we are going through a particular virulent phase of the rhythm epidemic.

And chief among the influences to be credited or blamed for this phenomenon is undoubtedly television.

There are at present no fewer than five weekly peak hour shows devoted exclusively to the playing and plugging of pop music. This compares with two programmes about politics, three about current affairs and two off-peak shows fortnightly devoted to all the arts.

Perhaps the strangest aspect of these pop programmes – presumably devoted to the ever-changing tastes and fads of their fans – is how quickly they congeal into frozen formulas and into mindless repetitiveness of the same technical gimmicks.

Oldest

The three oldest in the business – Ready, Steady, Go!, Thank Your Lucky Stars, and Juke Box Jury – have remained practically unchanged, down to the compere’s cement smiles, for almost three years.

Now with stentorian fanfares two of them ushered in what they shouted was to be a fresh era in pop presentation.

“We’re all terribly excited,” said Cathy McGowan, introducing Ready, Steady Goes Live. “It’s the very first show of its kind where everybody sings live.” If memory serves me right I thought that was what TV used to do before most of Miss McGowan’s audience were actually born.

There was no doubt that something fresh had to be done to Ready, Steady, Go! which had deteriorated disastrously from its early days, when its free-and-easy mingling of artists and audiences had given the show a spontaneity and bounce that appealed triumphantly to the very young.

But of late is anarchic shooting had become an excuse for sloppy directing, its natural studio environment had become a refuge for lazy set designers and cheap budgets, and its gay, lively enthusiasts had diminished into a jumble of spotty faced, frozen gawkers.

Harried into going live by a growing suspicion among audiences that mime merely disguised the incompetence of its performers, Ready, Steady, Go! moved into a larger studio and recruited some prettier girls into the audience.

But apart from discovering two girls who could sing remarkably like Dionne Warwick, it cannot be said that a new millennium in pop programmes was opened up by the renovation.

The problem of singing live proved that only Tom Jones and Miss Warwick could perform as effectively without the help of recording engineers. The actual sound balance of the programme was atrocious, with rhythm beats blotting out melodies and the background noises blurring the singing.

There was chaos in the cueing, with performers caught with their instruments down and egg all over their guitars. “You’ve done it again,” cried Manfred Mann at a bad cue. “Ready, Steady Goes Live. Aspirin sales have doubled!”

A.B.C.’s Thank Your Lucky Stars did much better with its revised show. Getting rid of all the nonsense stunts – audience markings “O’ll give it foive,” extraneous disc jockeys – the acts took place in a well-marked off arena, divorced form the audiences, allowing the lighting effects to play their full part.

Screams

By cutting to the fist-chewing, hysterical screamers in the audience only when it was needed to match the effect of the performers, the viewers at home could get an uncluttered, clean-cut picture of groups like the Beatles, the Animals and the Drifters without interruptions from the stamping fett and waggling behinds of the studio fodder.

I am at a loss, however, to explain the continued tolerance of the B.B.C. for Juke Box Jury. The juxtaposition of close-ups of astigmatic children and square-faced Moms with the sound of the latest records has long since ceased to be of any conceivable visual interest.

The sight of middle-aged people like David Tomlinson, Joan Turner and Catherine Boyle trying to communicate their with-it-ness to a glum-faced, mummified audience is one of the continuing embarrassments on TV.

What conceivable use their judgments are escapes me when last week no fewer than seven out of nine records were solemnly nominated as hits. David Tomlinson, indeed, voted for nine out of nine as hits which, as a standard, would make the turnover in the Top Ten as active as an explosion of jumping beans.

Smashing

This programme, like Ready Steady Go! also tends to correlate pop music with inarticulateness. The vocabulary of Sue Lloyd on Juke Box Jury seemed to be confined chiefly to the words “I love it, I think it’s great.” Cathy McGowan, doing most of the talking in Ready, Steady, Go! announced a “smashing” competition, thanked Manfred Mann for a “smashing” arrangement, said a harmonica player was “smashing” and told us that the four dancing couples we were going to see were – guess what? “smashing.”

And, in addition to doing something about this potential deleterious effect on teenager speech, could the producers of these programmes not be so shamelessly ready to plug any new American star that happens to float into town?

Dionne Warwick, in spite of her undoubted talent, does not deserve a spot on the Eamonn Andrews Show, Ready, Steady, Go!, Thank Your Lucky Stars and Juke Box Judy [sic] in just under ten days.

It would, indeed, be healthier all round if the entire pop world were farm more independent of the public relations men in the record business.

The post Five pop shows on television to every two where they talk about politics 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.

I extended this time travel trip to one week and one day so I could arrive early to catch an edition of my regional news.

18th May
ATV Today
ATV Midlands

Today the Midlands’ local news programme is taking us around Birmingham’s Wholesale Markets. It’s an early start for the reporter who begins in a local caff. It’s all toast, tea and fags. We see one old fellow taking a couple of jugs out and back across to the impressive Smithfield Market building. Inside, you can see the names of all the traders over their pitches. Interviewees play over footage of the going-ons of the markets. They really make Birmingham sound fantastic. Fish caught in Torquay the day before can be in Birmingham before the shops have opened in Torquay. In fact, fish come to Birmingham from various countries and the punters rate the quality. In a time before motorways became so widespread, this seems quite an impressive feat for the Midlands.

There’s also affection for the jovial atmosphere of the place, with one young man commenting, “I love working down here – it’s fantastic. I wouldn’t work anywhere else now.” The interviewees are a mixed bunch as some have local accents while others are much more RP. It’s great to hear them as though regional accents are becoming more common, the Midlands still feels underrepresented. It would have been nice to see what they all looked like but there isn’t the time on this short seven minute feature.

19th May
The Avengers ‘Room Without a View’
Rediffusion

The first half of series 5 has recently finished so Rediffusion has decided to repeat random episodes from series 4, although next week they will take a break for the Ice Skating World Professional Championships. While I had seen the odd episode, the True Entertainment channel’s decision to show ABC’s The Avengers from the beginning last year gave me the chance to become properly acquainted with the show. I grew fond of the charming, beautifully dressed Steed and the arse-kicking Cathy Gale. I’ve only seen as far as series 3 though, making this a step forward for me.

I hope 1960s’ audiences were able to appreciate the switch from videotape to film because for me it’s a huge difference compared to the earlier series. Not only is the picture better but the sound is clearer – I had had to strain, often struggling to hear some of the speech before.

The plot has people being kidnapped and brainwashed, believing they are somewhere in Manchuria. In fact, it’s a tape player and a couple of oriental guards through the back of a wardrobe in a London hotel. Steed plays the part of a food critic wonderfully, mentioning that a meal was ruined by the use of salted instead of unsalted butter. Mrs Peel is far too efficient a receptionist though and draws suspicion, resulting in her being gassed and waking up in ‘Manchuria’. When Steed discovers the false back to the wardrobe, he soon finds her cell but first must wrestle the two guards.

I described both the guards as ‘oriental’ because who knows what the one is supposed to be. 1960s’ television has shown me some dodgy make-up and blacked-up characters but this is the absolute champion. With a name like Romo Gorrara, the actor may not be of British heritage but he is definitely a white man and whatever they have done to his eyes does nothing to convince me otherwise. The production team were clearly struggling to find enough stuntmen because putting Gorrara next to Anthony Chinn, who is actually half-Chinese, makes it look all the more terrible.

20th May
George and the Dragon
ABC

I’ve seen ATV’s George before during my first visit to 1968. In this episode George and Dragon argue over the evening’s entertainment with George dismissing Dragon’s old fashioned records. Dragon protectively says they were her mother’s and she loves them. In a tussle, George tries to wrench them from her and they smash on the floor. There’s an audible intake of breath from the audience who were clearly as pained as this viewer. Dragon announces she’s leaving and we next see her at a bus station cafe.

A truck driver attempts to chat her up, only for each male member of the household to appear – George, Ralph the gardener, and their employer, John le Mesurier. The truck driver is astonished that she isn’t married to any of them and is increasingly impressed. As they convince Dragon to come home, he realises he doesn’t stand a chance so steps away and wishes her well.

21st May
I Spy ‘Bridge of Spies’
ABC

Unlike The Saint and other shows, I Spy doesn’t need to put a caption up at the beginning of the episode to tell us we’re in Venice because they’ve actually gone and filmed there it seems. The locations in this episode look fantastic. We are actually proper abroad! It’s so nice to spend some time out of a studio set for a change and they are such beautiful locations. The show really makes the most of them.

Kelly and Scott are a couple of agents playing at being tourists. Kelly is a tennis player, giving the pair reason to travel to various place but in this episode all their spy contacts keep dropping dead before they can speak to them. They struggle to figure out how the enemy is staying one step ahead. Well, maybe Kelly should have spent less time shagging tour guides who make deception plans with lines like, “I will combine high-level socialism with a low cut dress.”

I won’t skip mentioning the one thing that I Spy does, which is that Scott is black, played by Bill Cosby. It’s wonderful that it does go unremarked with no bearing on anything in the episode because the 1960s is not a great time to be black in the US. Only next month will the US Supreme Court will decide that state laws forbidding interracial marriage are invalid. Yet here he is in a starring role! Scott is very much Kelly’s equal and they’re genuine partners. They get on well and I enjoyed watching them together onscreen.

22nd May
Trumpton
BBC One

A lot of things about Trumpton seem familiar; the theme, the animation-style, Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, Grub. Yet I have no memories of watching Trumpton as a child and a crawl through BBC Genome says it was last repeated several years before my birth. In fact, the only source I can pinpoint for a definite contribution to my familiarity with any of Trumptonshire is Life on Mars. The BBC drama about a police officer trapped in the early 1970s promoted its second series with its lead characters of Sam Tyler and Gene Hunt in Trumptonshire form.

I thought Trumpton was terrific, something I hadn’t expected to find myself writing about a fairly simple young children’s programme. But it’s just so lovely. It reminds me of other children’s shows like Noddy, Postman Pat and Thomas the Tank Engine, which also exist in their own pleasant little towns. I want to get to know the townsfolk. I love that the carpenter is called Chippy. I love that the town has its own rag and bone man. This episode revolved around an old rocking horse that was going to be burned but the carpenter’s son rushed around to save it as he had hidden his savings inside. What a wonderful small drama for the day.

The Invaders ‘Moonshot’
ATV Midlands

Granada are also screening this show tonight, though they are a few episodes behind ATV Midlands. I’d been looking forward to The Invaders for some time as the TVTimes’ synopses always make it sound fantastic and several people had recommended the show to me. Aliens have invaded Earth but as they can shape shift to look like humans, hardly anyone knows about them. David Vincent saw them arrive though and attempts to thwart the threat, struggling to get people to believe him. In this episode, the invaders have infiltrated the space programme, replacing an astronaut with a copy. This was so tense, so exciting – it was just so brilliant. I will definitely be watching more.

24th May
The Baron ‘Countdown’
Granada

While I try to avoid repeating myself across the years, I’d been impressed enough with 1966’s episode of The Baron to want to come back for more, crossing the border into Granadaland after finding it in their schedule for this week. Both ATV London and ATV Midlands have finished their runs of The Baron, broadcasting the episodes in different orders after the first episode. For ATV London, this was the final episode, while ATV Midlands put it as the penultimate one. Granada have placed it as episode 22 out of 30. None of this actually matters as most episodes of ITC programmes stand completely independently and it’s rare to find any continuity woven in.

It was a strong start for me as the guest stars caption appeared with Edward Woodward and Philip Locke. Over the last couple of years I’ve become a big fan of Callan, the spy drama starring Woodward, and haven’t seen him in much else so I was looking forward to his appearance. This episode of The Baron was filmed shortly after he had finished an episode of Armchair Theatre, ‘A Magnum for Schneider’, that was also the pilot for Callan. Philip Locke’s name was also familiar to me, as he appears in the James Bond film Thunderball as a henchman who ‘got the point’ of a spear gun.

The Baron is on his way to meet a man called White who has some information for him. After he falls for the classic fake diversion trick, he’s trapped in a tunnel and gets kidnapped. In a marvellous twist on convention, it’s his female companion, Cordelia, who has to come to his rescue. Philip Locke as Compton poses as the Baron to go meet White but our hero turns up and smacks Compton, giving White the chance to make a run for it. Unfortunately White cops it anyway and the police tell the Baron that he had recently been working for Arkin Morley. The Baron knows Morley, who is a filmmaker as well as a fellow antique dealer. “Morley’s about the largest antique dealer in Europe, isn’t he?” says Codelia. “Yes and about the crookedest.” replies the Baron, which turns out to be a somewhat slanderous statement as the policeman says Morley has never been convicted of anything.

The Baron heads off to see Morley and I find it incredibly strange to hear Woodward (who’s taken 27 minutes to turn up) being so well-spoken. Throughout the episode, when he’s spouting particular venom, the refinement slips for a moment to reveal a much dirtier character beneath. Morley and Mannering exchange some banter and Morley gives away that this is all about a valuable sword, which previously fetched a quarter of a million dollars.

Everything starts to move a lot faster as the Baron and Cordelia head off to a house in search of the sword, but Morley and Compton have followed them. It feels like they have cheated a little by turning up with guns. They lock the Baron and Cordelia up for a bit. Yet it all goes terribly wrong for Morley after he asks Compton to shoot Mannering. Despite having a perfectly clean line of sight with his victim cornered, for reasons we will never know Compton decides to walk within a foot of the Baron, who takes the opportunity to knock the gun away. Morley legs it.

Steve Forrest has several inches on Edward Woodward and once the latter’s poorly-aimed bullets run out, it isn’t looking good. “I’m taking you in,” Mannering tells Morley, though I’m not entirely sure what for. Morley has committed unlawful imprisonment and attempted murder, but the Baron has no evidence of any of this. Also, the Baron knocked Compton about a fair bit before leaving his body on the floor underneath a large stone coffin lid so he could easily be up for manslaughter himself. I’d started to quite like Morley, who has far more witty lines than Mannering and had been a rather cool, cold villain. This last section of the episode has flown by and while I’m enjoying The Baron, I don’t find John Mannering a particularly compelling character – there just isn’t much to him. So far, it’s the plots and the guest cast that are bringing the quality to this show.

25th May
Danger Man ‘The Outcast’
ATV Midlands

I last saw Danger Man back in 1962 and like then this is a repeat from two years earlier. Though I have seen a number of the 25 minute episodes, this was my first of the later 50 minute ones. I’ve enjoyed the half-hour episodes because the action moves so quickly, yet there are some episodes where I’ve felt the plot would benefit from being drawn out. There is a new title sequence too but I really don’t like the music. The other change is that someone has stolen John Drake’s American accent. Maybe he had just spent too long away.

Drake heads off to Spain to befriend a sailor who has gone AWOL from Gibraltar. He is suspected of murdering a WREN who gave away signals intelligence. The sailor, Leo, is played by Bernard Bresslaw and oh gosh he’s just so lovely that I can’t believe he’s done it. Drake pretends to be a slightly dodgy character who is planning to leave for South America, that favourite lawless land so beloved by Nazis and criminals the world over at this time. To show just how awful he is, Drake stages a shooting so that Leo believes he’s murdered a guard. Leo is absolutely horrified but it works as Drake uses it as leverage to get Leo to confess. When Leo finds out who Drake really is, he confronts him with a gun. It soon becomes clear he won’t use it though and it’s rather a sad, pitiful ending.

What you could have won – missing and unavailable

Here are some of the listings that intrigued me but I was unable to watch this week.

MISSING Those Two Fellers – After several years of writing for other people, Dick Hills and Sid Green have their own series with different guest stars each week. Two comedians they have written plenty for over the last few years are Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise, who are among the guests this week. Only one series was made and no complete episodes exist.

UNKNOWN Wheelbase – The world of motoring. This episode explores how to manage abroad with the limits of taking currency out of the country, which at the time was capped at £50. While not an insignificant sum, after travel and hotel costs, it probably didn’t leave holidaymakers with a great deal of spending money.

MISSING The Likely Lads ‘Friends and Neighbour’ – Although several episodes of The Likely Lads do exist, this repeat isn’t one of them, making it your last ever chance to see it. I first met Terry and Bob through the radio adaptations of the sequel series, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, before moving on to the same TV series. I’d love to get to know the earlier incarnations of the lads.

MISSING Armchair Thriller ‘The Snares of Death’ – The details given in TVTimes about this episode, starring Alfred Burke, are tantalising. An undertaker’s business is struggling and he ponders what can be done about it. He ‘thinks he has solved his troubles but the plan takes a macabre twist’. There are some colour promo photos with Burke posing over a coffin. His slightly offbeat expressions intrigue me even more.

The post Back in time for TV: 18-25 May 1967 appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

1961

I’ve found a few things I know this week but most of the schedule is still alien to me.

This week my ITV programmes are coming from ATV Midlands.

4th March
Perry Mason ‘The Case of the Restless Redhead’
BBC Television

IMDB lists this as the first episode of Perry Mason but the BBC have actually been showing the US series for several weeks. Our eponymous lead is a law attorney investigator and this week his client is a woman falsely accused of murder. The plot for this is not overly complex but I felt like I was missing bits until everything all came out in the courtroom near the end. I feel that Perry Mason needs a sidekick so he can explain what his line of thought is during some of the investigation. He has a wife who could take this role but she doesn’t have much to do and we don’t see her away from their home.

I was struck by the huge cars in this. They don’t scream ‘Sixties’ to me so much as they shout ‘America’ – and as this went out in the US four years earlier, that seems more suited. Even considering that though Mason is an attorney, it seems like such affluence, which I just don’t associate with the UK at this time. Some of the blokes in this are huge – both in height and shoulder width. It all speaks of a population well-fed and doing well.

5th March
Elsa the Lioness
BBC Television

This documentary follows Elsa, a lion who was orphaned as a cub. She was raised by humans, George and Joy, who trained her so she could be released back into the wild. The story would become well-known in the film Born Free. Elsa has had cubs of her own and in the documentary we see her visiting Joy and George in Kenya. While she is completely at ease with the humans, her cubs are not and one acts rather protectively.

David Attenborough narrates this and we see him briefly at the start. I’ve previously watched a few episodes of his Zoo Quest series, which began in the 1950s. It’s interesting to see and hear a younger version of someone that you feel you know so well. Attenborough’s voice sounds different yet it is still instantly recognisable.

6th March
Picture Book
BBC Television

The Watch with Mother strand for very young children ran for many years with a different programme each day of the week. Today is Monday so we’re watching Picture Book, although as I’m limited by available choice, this episode is from 1963.

I have written before about how I became familiar with the Watch with Mother programmes. Initially, I didn’t actually remember Picture Book – the title certainly didn’t ring any bells from my childhood. However, with the appearance of a little nodding wooden sausage dog, something tinkled. Then when the lady started making paper lanterns I knew I had seen this before.

I was pleasantly surprised when we got a cartoon, even if it was incredibly basic. Bizzy Lizzy is a small girl with short blonde hair, who wears a dress with a flower on it. When she touches the flower, she can have up to four wishes. She asks for curly hair, then for longer hair, even longer hair and soon it won’t stop growing. She wishes for it to stop but she’s wished too much and it all disappears. I am aware Bizzy Lizzy got her own programme a few years later so I’d be curious to see what that was like.

7th March
The Perry Como Music Hall
BBC Television

The BBC are showing another US programme with a man called Perry. I managed to find an episode from almost a year earlier. In the US, it’s called Perry Como’s Kraft Music Hall because Kraft is the sponsor and therefore their adverts suddenly appear throughout the show. The BBC would obviously have taken these out but it gave me an interesting look at why people didn’t want British television advertising to be like the US. There is no clear cut of ‘we’re going to take a short ad break’ or even a title card – it just cuts straight into another Kraft product.

The words ‘Music Hall’ should probably have set my alarm bells off that this was not going to be my thing but I decided to give it a go anyway. An hour of singing and dancing and everything sounded a bit samey to me. The redeeming factor for me was that the host, Perry Como, was excellent. He had a great voice and was wonderfully charismatic. It feels like a big Saturday night entertainment show, yet the 1961 audience is getting it on a Tuesday.

8th March
Saber of London
ATV Midlands

The title made me think sabre-tooth tigers so I was sure this would be an exciting show. The title is also a confusing point as my research shows that the programme has several. Our central character is a detective called Mark Saber and over on TWW, at roughly the same time, they are showing Mark Saber. It may well have been the same episode or possibly not. It doesn’t matter because I don’t know which episode ATV are showing either – I’ve found a random one, first broadcast in the US in 1957.

A man is found dead, from what appears to be a heart attack but Saber eventually figures out that he was in fact murdered with a poisoned dart after a phone call. It seemed so utterly ludicrous that someone could have rigged a telephone to fire a poisoned dart that it kept me watching purely to find out what really happened.

10th March
No Hiding Place ‘The Widower’
ATV Midlands

It wouldn’t matter who I was getting my ITV programmes from tonight because all of them are showing Rediffusion’s No Hiding Place. Over eight years, 236 episodes were made but only 25 exist now, making it something of a minor miracle that this week’s episode happens to be one of them. I’d seen two others in the last couple of years and loved them both so I had high hopes for this.

After a neighbour reports that she believes a man murdered his wife, the police decide to investigate. We will gloss over this first most unrealistic of circumstances because there are enough to come. The police focus on tracking down the husband and it seems he’s got various names and various wives. They keep dropping down dead from heart attacks.

The police manage to speak to a doctor, who describes the man, then adds that he ‘had a thing about tobacco smoke’. The way he says it implies that this is very strange. I’m not particularly trusting of 1961 doctors after this programme though. This doctor offers the policeman a cigarette, a different doctor advises someone to ‘have a good stiff whisky and relax’ but later refuses to accept a chocolate liqueur because he’s driving.

It emerges that the bigamist is killing people with nicotine. In You Only Live Twice, Blofeld allows 007 to light up and says, ‘it won’t be the nicotine that kills you, Mr Bond’. This always irritates me because the nicotine in cigarettes doesn’t kill you – you don’t ingest enough of it. However, pure nicotine is much more lethal and our man here has been poisoning his wives. He’s been putting it in chocolates and then directly on their skin. Despite managing to get away with murder and maintain multiple identities (one of his wives believes he’s a spy, allowing him to apparently disappear for months at a time without questions!), for reasons never explained, our bigamist/poisoner/amateur tobacco grower keeps a list in his desk drawer of all his wives and the dates he married them. Presumably, he had found it difficult to keep track of all the anniversaries.

What you could have won – missing and unavailable

Here are some of the listings that intrigued me but I was unable to watch this week.

UNAVAILABLE Danger Is My Business – ‘A film series telling the story of people whose work involves physical danger. Major ‘Robby’ Robinson of the U.S.A.F. leads a team of supersonic acrobats known as the ‘Thunderbirds’.’ Well this just sounds incredibly cool.

UNKNOWN Rooms in View: 2: The Kitchen – Kenneth Horne is among the people discussing kitchen planning and what equipment to buy. I’m mostly intrigued as to what items would be deemed essential in a 1961 kitchen.

UNKNOWN On the Spot – The Daily Mail is offering £7,500 to whoever best demonstrates that they deserve it for their business. This listing caught my eye as among the judges is a Mrs John Profumo, also known as actress Valerie Hobson. About four months later, her husband would meet Christine Keeler and set the wheels in motion for one of British politics greatest ever scandals.

MISSING Knight Errant Limited – Only a couple of episodes of this exist and I’ve seen it under various titles: Knight Errant ’59, Knight Errant ’60 or just Knight Errant. A young man sets up a detective agency, displaying the advertisement: ‘Knight Errant ’59. Quests undertaken, dragons defeated, damsels rescued. Anything, anywhere, for anyone, so long as it helps. Fees according to means.’

The post Back in time for TV: 4-10 March 1961 appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.