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.

SINCE EAMONN ANDREWS seems to have a hammer-lock contract with ABC TV that guarantees him large sums of money for some time yet, it is doubtful if anything so drastic as annihilation will take place in the near future.

His recent Sunday evening programmes have managed to reduce conversation to an intellectual level that makes tiddly-winks, by comparison, a major art form.

Neither the producer of this programme, Malcolm Morris, nor its editor, Tom Brennand, seem to have the faintest conception of what conversation really is.

Any dictionary will tell them that it is an exchange or inter-change of views and ideas and not a succension of monologues or party turns stimulated by nothing better than a pre-organised cue on one of Mr. Andrews’s mysterious prompt cards.

And as any hostess from Surbiton to Belgravia can tell them, you are not likely to get good conversation unless the assembled people have something remotely in common about which they are prepared to argue, chat or joke.

But judging from recent recruits to the dentist’s waiting-room laughingly described as a set your chances of being invited to this programme are considerably enhanced if you happen to be an American actor making a film in England, if only a minute proportion of the viewing audience has ever beard of you, and if your talent as a talker is largely confined to your ability to answer questions about your early life with something more than a grunt.

Euphemistically Eamonn’s guests are hailed as Sunday Night People, but consider ing the relative obscurity of a large proportion of them I suggest Wednesday Matinee People as a more appropriate description.

Obscurity, of course, is no bar to being a good conversationalist, but rarely have any of these people anything to offer but an innocuous grin, a knowing nudge about what went on when they saw Frank Sinatra (“He’s one of the greats! Just one of the greats!”) wearing a funny hat on a golf course in Milwaukee, and a mention for the film they’re involved in.

The plugging that goes on during this programme is sometimes shamefully blatant. I remember him introducing a girl called Sheila White, who had an undistinguished song to sing in the musical On The Level, as “A little girl I reckon’s going to be a big star.”

She proceeded to stomp around in a noisy, grimacing manner that would hardly have justified her appearance on Hughie Green’s Amateur Nights and displayed as much star potential as Eamonn Andrews in the role of Othello.

Sometimes the programme luckily gets an extrovert like Sir John Barbirolli who is amusing value as long as no one interrupts his stories. But more often vital personalities like Vanessa Redgrave are reduced to the status of embarrassed, limp observers trying to smile bravely at show biz anecdotes told by their more exhibitionist fellow-guests.

And if his guests could be orchestrated into some sort of a central discussion and leave him with little to do but act as a direction finder, there is no good reason why Eamonn Andrews should not continue to compere it. He is a pleasant, likeable professional.

But it could be that The Eamonn Andrews Show has already reached the point of no-return.

When the best brains, the best wits, the best conversationalists often refuse to take part in it because its standards have become embarrassingly low then there is nothing for ABC to do but either wind it up or get down to some drastic reshaping of the show’s entire structure and philosophy.

– Milton Shulman

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CAULIFLOWER TV KEEPS GROWING like a parasitic ivy on all channels. These ear-bashing, studio-bound programmes, which owe everything to radio and nothing to vision, have an unhealthy way of proliferating themselves.

The interview and the discussion are the two main off-shoots of cauliflower TV and at their best levels these can offer some of the most stimulating and rewarding moments on the small screen.

John Freeman’s Face To Face revealed what excitement could be generated by the confrontation of a serious mind with a serious and sympathetic interrogator.

In recent weeks one could have seen no fewer than four variations on this confrontation theme – The Reputation Makers, with Angus Wilson, Intimations, with Malcolm Muggeridge, The Levin Interview, with Bernard Levin, and People to Watch, with Robert McKenzie and Erskine Childers.

From the various samplings I have taken of these programmes, they are all more or less successful. Indeed, they have a builtin, cast-iron formula for success if the producer is sensible enough to get two essential elements right.

Failures

Most important of all, he must have – as all these programmes have – an interviewer who is not only articulate, quick and logical, but who is catholic in his curiosity and sceptical about values and judgments.

Pit such a man against another intelligent man with an established reputation or deep convictions or imaginative horizons and the resultant talk, if it is given time to develop, will usually be absorbing.

Naturally. there are failures. Sometimes the personalities involved develop such mutual antipathy or disinterest that a barbed or bored exchange of platitudes is the only result. But, on the whole, this is the best kind of cauliflower TV.

The discussion programme, on the other hand, seems to be going downhill at the speed of the devil on a bobsleigh.

Although there is a good deal of discussion on BBC-3, Late Night Line-Up and 24 Hours (a much improved programme, incidentally), the two programmes – aside from religion and schools – that devote their time almost exclusively to a group exchange of views are Late Show London and The Eamonn Andrews Show.

When one compares the calibre of speakers and talk of both these shows with former discussion programmes like Free Speech and The Brains Trust, one becomes apprehensively aware of what TV can do to crush into disrepute the once-civilised art of conversation.

Offender

Late Show London is the worst offender because it pretends to engage in serious talk and splatters all concerned with humiliation by the glib, cynical and fatuous way in which it goes about it.

Although it began as a magazine show aimed at reflecting the gaiety, variety and sparkle of London life, in less than a month it has been purged of everything but the talkers.

The Eamonn Andrews Show, too, seems to be in a desperate plight to find “the famous, frank and funny people” it blurbs.

On Sunday we had three actors – Michael Crawford, Martine Carol and James Booth – and a publisher, Gareth Powell, who might most charitably be described as non-famous, once-famous and non-funny people. With nothing important to be frank about, it’s not surprising they weren’t frank either.

Anyone in the theatre knows that actors can be as witty as Wilde, as wise as Shaw, and as profound as Montherlant only when they have memorised the appropriate lines.

The emergence of the actor as the wit, the sage, the commentator, the thinker of our time reveals into what a disastrous, intellectual abyss we are being plunged in order to please the moronic tastes of the telegawkers.

– Milton Shulman

The post Oh! those awful earbashing programmes 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.

THE Small Faces will sing these lines during their number “I Can’t Make It” in The Morecambe and Wise Show on Sunday.

Just to print them, as above, costs £1 1s [£1.05 in decimal, £18.50 now allowing for inflation]. When the complete song is sung on television on Saturday the composers and publishers will share a further £53 12s. 7d. [about £53.63, £950] paid by the television company.

There’s money all right in words and music.

And the song-writing season is with us again.

Now, as the evenings draw in, thousands of more active amateurs, are tinkling, one-fingered, at pianos, fiddling with tape, juggling, jiggling and jingling to find that magic permutation of crochets, quavers, that spells … H—I—T.

Dick James is head of Northern Songs, who publish Beatle numbers. His quote: “We get 20 songs a week through the post in summer. Now our mailbag swells to 50 a week.” Multiply that by 400, the approximate number of British publishers.

That is 20,000 hopeful writers each week from now until spring.

You can’t blame them for trying to ring the bell.

Take television this week. Bobby Rydell as well as The Small Faces will sing pop songs in The Morecambe and Wise Show. So will The Dave Clark Five in The Golden Shot. So, probably, will at least one guest in The Eamonn Andrews Show. So will stars on more localised programmes.

Every time someone sings on a fully networked television show, the composers and publishers of that number are paid £53 12s. 7d. by the television company. On local stations a minimum of £6 [£106 allowing for inflation] is shared by the people behind the song.

Ah yes, but how do they keep track of each performance? The writer doesn’t have to bother. It’s done for him by the Performing Right Society. They collect more than £5 million [£88.5m] a year from performances all over the world, even behind the Iron Curtain. Last year from ITV alone they collected £687,950 [£13m].

So you want to be a songwriter? Perry Ford, of The Ivy League, writes about 15 numbers that are recorded each year.

He is one of the elite “in-crowd” among Britain’s song writers. His quote: “My first ever song ‘Someone Else’s Baby,’ in 1960, was a hit for Adam Faith. It just came into my head when I was tinkling the piano.

“The record sold a quarter of a million copies. My cut was £1,500.” [£27,000]

BUT … if someone sings a song by Perry in the Eamonn Andrews Show on Sunday, his share would be £26 16s. 3½d. [about £26.82 in decimal, £475 after inflation]

There are 970 full members of The Song Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, and 890 associate members (the part-time songwriters). A few years ago, the Performing Right Society worked out the average earnings from royalties for a composer was £400 [£7000] a year.

But it is virtually impossible to pin down the “average” in song writing. You can earn a fortune one year (“A Whiter Shade of Pale” could earn £30,000 [£532,000]) and nothing for the next two. Royalties can keep dribbling in for decades.

A high percentage of the songs we hear each week originate from a nucleous of established writers — Perry Ford, Chris Andrews, Graham Gouldman, Les Reed, Mitch Murray, Mick Jagger and Keith Richard (of The Rolling Stones), Tom Springfield.

And, of course, the pop daddies of ’em all, John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Round figures become staggering when you investigate their song-writing activities. By the end of the year, they should have completed 120 numbers.

A recent audit showed, since they started five years ago, 2,921 different versions have been recorded, selling 200,000,000 copies at an iceberg cool £20,000,000 [£355m]. And we’re not counting Performing Right Royalties.

In its first 18 months of existence Northern Songs received £289,292 [£5m] in royalties. A quarter of the holdings were sold when the company went public. John and Paul netted £96,875 [£1.7m] each. Tax free — this was before the capital gains tax was introduced.

Dick James, balding, with heavily-rimmed spectacles, sits behind a huge executive desk around the corner from Tin Pan Alley and talks song-writing amicably, but briskly.

“1 wouldn’t buy a song outright. In the past, hard-up writers have sold their interest for a quick fiver and thrown away thousands in royalties Now we work on a shared basis. It gives the business a better reputation.

“No, I don’t think any intentional plagiarism goes on. But be fair: there are only 13 notes for song-writers, amateurs or professionals, to play with. They’ve been permutated for hundreds of years. There are bound to be accidental coincidences.”

But with pop songs, some people, some of the time, just can’t go wrong. No wonder so many people are tinkering with pianos and fiddling with tape recorders now the darker evenings are here.

You’ve heard Dick’s voice at some time or other. You must have, singing the signature tune of ITV’s marathon series Robin Hood. He recorded it in 1955 a month before ITV started and accepted a £100 [£2,610] flat fee. They used the fifth of 37 takes.

Dick said, ruefully: “If I had had a modest royalty, say five bob a performance, I would have made thousands from it. But I did earn £3,000 [£78,000] from record sales of the same number.”

The post Lanning and the write-price of pop appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.