FIELD Marshal Lord Montgomery could probably tell you offhand just how many people are required to keep one soldier on the field of battle, and it is very much the same in television.

To get one programme broadcast requires not only the men and women in the studio, but thousands of ‘back-room’ workers.
Many of the Programme Producers are women. Among them are Lorna Pegram, responsible for BBC’s Wednesday Magazine, and Yvonne Littlewood, whom we associate with This is Your Life. Elizabeth Cowley is acknowledged in the ‘Radio Times’ as an Associate Producer of Tonight.

Some have very specialised jobs. There is Miss G. M. Miller, who is Head of the Pronunciation Unit that clues-up the News Readers on the correct way of pronouncing proper names and places in foreign countries, and tongue-twisters nearer home. To mispronounce Kirkcudbright in Scotland, or Llanfaircaereinion in Wales (it is Kurrcoo-bree and Thlan-furr-kurr-enyen) would provoke the natives of both nations to bombard the BBC with complaints.

Miss Anna Instone, whom we associate with that popular Sunday series Music Magazine, is the woman responsible for building up the BBC’s record department, starting in the old days at Savoy Hill.

One of the penalties of popularity is the well-meaning criticism of many viewers, as BBC News Reader, Richard Baker can tell you. He is sometimes referred to jokingly, among his colleagues at Alexandra Palace, where the news comes from, as ‘the heartthrob’ because of the amount of fan mail he receives. He once returned from holiday wearing a moustache. When he read the six o’clock news the switchboard was jammed by angry viewers demanding that he shave it off. When he reappeared, to read the later bulletin, he was clean shaven.

Many of his fan letters contained proposals of marriage, till he settled that problem by getting married himself, to Margaret Martin, whom he had known since childhood.

Well in the forefront of a new generation of television personalities is David Dimbleby, who was acting as Chairman of a Quest programme and reporting for the What’s New? series within months of his coming down from Oxford in 1961. After leaving Charterhouse, David spent four months at the Sorbonne in Paris, and another three months in Italy, at Perugia, polishing up his languages. Then to Christ Church, Oxford, where he read Politics, Philosophy and Economics, and edited ‘Isis’, the University periodical.

He considered the Bar as a career, and is young enough to change his mind about television and aim for the Woolsack.

‘But,’ he says, ‘TV has been part of my life, always talked about and pulled to pieces. It provides some of the things I wanted -variety, travel, different people, different work each day, and the personal freedom I value.’

To secure that freedom he opted to become a free-lance rather than a staff man.

‘In a strange way, too,’ he explains, ‘I suppose the Father-Son pull, a need for some sort of continuity, may have played a part, though of course in television you are very much on your own.’

Among the girls whose faces we see on our screens, let’s take a look at Judith Chalmers. She began broadcasting in Children’s Hour when she was 13, from the Manchester studios, and in 1956 became the first regional announcer in Manchester. She was born in Cheadle, Cheshire, and has a keen north-country sense of humour. She loves travel and takes her holidays abroad, hunting out interesting places not mentioned in the highly coloured brochures issued by tourist agencies. Our Judy would rather go by local bus and train to the Dordogne, talking to everyone she meets, than fly in a luxury aircraft to Nice, there to lie on the beaches and have the skin burned off her shoulders!

Her longest working stint as a television announcer was Christmas Day, 1961, when she was on duty from the morning until close-down at night.

‘I had to be in make-up all day, and only had time to change my dress and put on a fresh lot of make-up while Michael Aspel was reading the news,’ she recalls.

Her Christmas leave came at New Year, when she went home to spend it with her family in Cheshire.

With thanks to Ian Fryer.

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AFN PROGRAM HIGHLIGHTS

Week of 23 – 29 April 1967

All over America, it is a nightly habit for bleary-eyed television fans to lie in their beds and stare at the television set between their toes. The reason for this unusual national habit is Johnny Carson’s TONIGHT show. AFN makes it easier for its listeners by presenting the highlights of these shows nightly Monday through Friday at 2230 hours. This week Carson fans have a number of treats in store for themselves.

MONDAY: Comic Woody Allen talks about Las Vegas . . . Jack Lord, actor, talks about his early days and the Mitchell Trio sings “Time to Love One Another”.

TUESDAY: Singer Steve Lawrence belts out “What Now My Love” and Art Linkletter talks about the early days of radio.

WEDNESDAY: George Segal, actor, sings and plays banjo and the hottest new talent in New York, Don Ho, sings “It Aint No big Thing”.

THURSDAY: Comic Corbett Monica is aboard tonight and talks about doing a play. Roberta Peters, opera star sings “The Nightingale”.

FRIDAY: Actress Phyllis Newman talks about visiting the White House and old-timer Rudy Vallee sings “Winchester Cathedral”.

A LISTENING REMINDER: With the start of summer weather, tuck a portable radio in your picnic basket. Weekends on AFN feature a variety of light, enjoyable programs to help make the lazy days pass pleasantly. Radio is your constant good companion and goes with you every place.

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AFN PROGRAM HIGHLIGHTS

Week of 2-8 April 1967

Regular listeners to AFN will have noticed a couple of new voices on old favorite programs during the past few weeks. Currently hosting AFN’s “WEEKEND WORLD” is Army Specialist Don Burns. Don re­placed Army Specialist Rick Scarry who has returned to the United States. The program also boasts a new producer — Army Specialist Ron Hitchcock. Hitchcock and Burns are presently planning a number of surprises for listeners to this program (1400-1800 Saturdays and Sundays) which ranges the world for features and music.

Another new voice is popular disc jockey Johnny Grant who now hosts “SMALL WORLD” (1405-1500 Monday through Friday). Johnny is well known to former residents of the Los Angeles area through his radio work there. He’s equally well known to service men because of the dozens of shows featuring top Hollywood stars he has brought to bases around the world.

The “TONIGHT” show this week, as always, has a great guest list. The 2230 presentation features Damita Jo, drummer Buddy Rich and author George Plimpton on Monday. Tuesday, Steve Allen and Frankie Laine guest. On Wednesday it’s the Joe Bushkin Trio, Della Reese and Lorne Greene (who plays “Goofus” on the violin). Thursday evening comic Bill Cosby and all-around entertainer Theodore Bikel appear and Friday its Arthur Prysock, Bud and Cee-Cee Robinson and author Gene Shepherd.

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

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

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

Speculation

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

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

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

The quirky

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

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

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

Metaphors

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

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

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

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

Eccentrics

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

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

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

Dullness

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

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

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

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

Obsession

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

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

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

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