THE future shines bright for Criss Cross Quiz interrogator Jeremy Hawk. Next Friday he makes his 74th appearance in the game which he launched on television seven months ago. And both the senior and junior versions seem likely to last for a long time to come.

Criss Cross Quiz has raised Jeremy Hawk to the top ranks of TV personalities. This winter his services are eagerly sought to open new stores. And no doubt when summer is with us he will be asked to do something similar at garden parties.

Needless to say, Hawk is immensely enjoying his sudden rise to fame. He loves his work, the chance it gives him of continually meeting new and interesting people, the drama of a well-fought game, and the tension and excitement when the total in the winnings box passes the four-figure mark.

He told me in particular how delighted he is at the success of Junior Criss Cross Quiz.

“I’ve met all kinds of contestants in these two programmes,” he said. “But I can say quite confidently that the children taking part in the junior edition are far easier to work with — and I should think, from the expressions on their faces, they are often much more enjoyable to watch.

“They are not nearly so inhibited as their elders. They are bright, cheerful, confident. And they get a kick out of the game.”

Hawk himself is relieved to find there are no difficult tongue-twisters among the junior-sized questions prepared for the Wednesday game.

“I’ve had to contend with quite a few in the adult quiz,” he recalled. “The most difficult of all was when I asked a contestant to give me the common word for … sorry, but I still find the name absolutely unpronounceable. Fortunately the man was a scientist and when he saw me getting hopelessly tongue-tied with it he said, ‘Do you mean acetylsalicylic acid? The answer is aspirin.’

“Gilbert Harding, an old friend of mine, once ticked me off for mispronouncing the name of the French mixed fish dish — bouillabaisse. And mother told me off — and quite rightly, too — for not pronouncing Haydn correctly.

“In both cases I was conscious I had said it wrong, but was too late to correct myself. Of course, I never see the questions before a programme, so I have no means of checking these things.

“A number of the questions include foreign words, so it is perhaps just as well that I have a smattering of a few languages. But I still came unstuck when I had to read out Prokofiev. It is a wonderful Russian name, but I had so much trouble that in the end I had to spell it out!”

Judging by the size of his fan mail, however, viewers don’t mind these occasional slips. “Yes, I get lots of letters,” he agreed, “and they have taught me that I have to be careful what I say during the programme.”

An important part of Hawk’s work is putting contestants at their ease. “It starts when I meet them for the first time at supper,” he said.

“Then we have a run through the programme – with dummy questions, of course — to get them used to the cameras.”

Hawk has received many letters from contestants after they have been on the programme thanking him for the considerate way he looked after them when they were facing the cameras.

But on only two occasions has he met them later. “Once, I was visiting my mother in a London hospital and I bumped into one of our winners there to see his father, who was also a patient.

“Then there was an out-of-work salesman we had on the programme. I mentioned this fact in the hope that it might help him get a job. The other day I was walking down a street and just by chance saw the young man in a showroom window and now he’s a car salesman.”

The post Answers are child’s play for the kids appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

THE trim, white-painted motor cruiser chugged in from the open sea and made for its home buoy. When it had been safely tied up, its owner, tanned and weather-beaten as from a lifetime in the open air, disappeared down the hatch.

Minutes later he was back on deck, his shorts replaced by a well pressed suit. Shore was only a few powerful oar-strokes away, and soon he was in his car and starting on the 85-mile trip to Manchester.

The purpose of his journey was to go in front of a television camera and tell viewers how to make friends with their ulcers.

The boat’s owner was the People and Places doctor, whose homely chats about the more popular aches and pains are becoming a regular feature of the programme.

Because of the BMA restrictions on publicity, the name of this twinkling-eyed doctor with the manner so suited to television cannot be given.

He is a 42-year-old general practitioner with a bigger-than-average practice, a wife and two children (a third expected in November).

He is a keen believer in as much outdoor life as possible. In the summer he captains his local cricket team. His winter sport is golf (he has a handicap of four) and he likes to sail the boat he keeps moored beneath the ancient walls of Conway Castle.

It was during his summer holiday that he drove to Manchester to give his talk on ulcers — and he went off to Wales again as soon as he could. The 30ft Bendigo, which was a Rhyl pilot boat before he bought her four years ago, gives him the holiday relaxation his busy life demands — far from the incessant ringing of the telephone, from the midnight knocks on the door.

And a holiday afloat is a natural choice, for he is no stranger to the sea. Before the last war, as a 17-year-old waiting to go into medical school, he became a deckhand in a Hull trawler and knew the sea in its wildest moods while riding out gales in the Icelandic fishing grounds. During the war he served in the Mediterranean in a luxury liner which had been turned into a hospital ship.

His breezy television approach to medicine has developed from his earlier appearances in Granada’s People and Places, when it was a late-night show.

“Who,” the doctor asked himself, “is going to sit up and listen to a public health lecture at 11 o’clock at night?”

Now he makes a practice of treating his subject in the most lighthearted way possible. He says: “I don’t believe illness is necessarily a matter for solemn faces. Everyone is concerned about health in one way or another and I try to talk about different aspects of it in a way that is easily understandable.

“The fact that it’s a serious subject doesn’t mean it has to be dull. For instance, when I discussed disabilities I thought it interesting to instance famous athletes, among them Olympic gold medallists, whose disabilities did not prevent them from making great physical efforts.”

The doctor had his TV baptism in an interview with Douglas Warth in Granada’s Sharp at Four nearly four years ago. A doctor was needed who was capable of standing up to Warth’s hard-hitting arguments, and this general practitioner, former president of Manchester University Union and a noted debater, was picked for the verbal battle.

“It very nearly developed into a standup fight,” he recalls, “but it was great fun.”

Since then he has been called on to appear in This Week, What the Papers Say and Under Fire. It was in the last that he led the doctors’ protests about their promised pay increases.

“The MP I was attacking said it was most unfair of me to accuse the Government of delaying tactics and assured us that there was going to be no delay at all in doing something about our pay. That was more than three years ago, and it is only now that we are going to get our increases.”

How does the doctor’s family view his TV appearances?

“My four-year-old boy saw me in one programme recently,” he says, “and when I got home he told me he liked Yogi Bear better. I must say that is a point of view with which I have every sympathy.”

The post The sailing doctor makes it breezy appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

FOR one week in the year, the Yorkshire spa of Harrogate puts on a French accent. Out come the tricolours, the bunting, the pavement cafe tables and the striped umbrellas. There are wine tastings and cookery demonstrations, French cabarets and French films. Even a French poodle show.

But for French Week 1960, which opens on Monday, there will be an added attraction — an on-the-spot visit by the entire People and Places team, led by those celebrated Francophiles Bill Grundy and Chris Howland.

“What’s a Francophile?” asks Howland.

“Don’t show your ignorance,” says Grundy. “It’s Latin for a Spanish rasp. You need educating. And if we re going to give the right touch to Wednesday’s programme from Harrogate, the sooner we start teaching you a thing or two the better.”

And that is how they came to be raiding the Granada wardrobe department (for Basque berets and Marseilles type T-shirts), the make-up room (for waxed moustaches and goatee beards), ending up over a cooker opening a tin of snails.

“Of course, eating snails is nothing new to me,” says Bill, spearing them from the tin and lovingly placing them one by one into the shells that come with them.

“Remember when you nipped over to visit me in Germany at the end of last year?” asks Chris, who is a top disc jockey on Cologne radio. “It was the time we went for a trip on a Rhine steamer.”

“Ah, yes,” muses Bill. “I remember getting off at the village of Unkel and buying two plates of snails and seven bottles of champagne. What happened next?”

“You spent the rest of the journey imitating an excitable Frenchman in front of a boatload of 600 puzzled passengers,” says Chris.

“It got rather embarrassing because most of them knew who I was but couldn’t understand how I had got mixed up with this ‘nana’ who was threatening to hit me over the head with a champagne bottle and screaming at me in a language he couldn’t speak.”

“I could,” objects Bill, who by now is filling the shells with a butter parsley-garlic mixture. “I’ll have you know that I can say My grandmother’s ear-trumpet has been struck by lightning without the trace of an accent.”

“Say it,” commands Chris.

“My grandmother’s ear-trumpet has been struck by lightning,” recites Bill in English, without batting an eyelid.

As the snails go in the oven to sizzle away in their aromatic sauce, the bitter friends, as they are known to the People and Places team, sit back to debate the form of Wednesday’s programme, which will come from the gaily-decorated, open-air market in the centre of Harrogate.

“I’m getting excited about meeting Maria Léa, the girl who heads the French cabaret,” says Bill. “She looks a peach.”

“I’m more interested in the French can-can girls,” says Chris.

“Sorry to disappoint you,” says Bill, pleased to air his superior knowledge, “but it’s only the can-can that’s French, not the girls. They’re as English as you are.”

“Let me tell you I have French blood in my veins,” protests Howland. “My ancestors came over during the French Revolution.”

“In that case, we ought to try you out with the French folklore group that’s coming to Harrogate,” says Bill, licking his lips as he lifts the snails out of the oven. “They dance a polka on stilts.”

“Is that possible?”

“Of course it’s possible. Their ancestors were shepherds who took to wearing stilts to keep an dye on their straying flocks. What did your ancestors do?”

“They were troubadours. They sang — and no one ever tried to stop them. People were nicer in those days,” says Chris, recalling the long standing feud about the exercise of the Howland vocal chords.

They move to the dining table, with Grundy instructing Howland in the gentle art of snail-eating as it is done in the better French families.

“Very clever,” murmurs Chris, admiring the swift manipulations of the Grundy fork as it probes shell after shell. “You must know France very well.”

“True,” says Bill. “I once spent a whole week there. In Paris. That was when I was a geologist. And the whole time was devoted to discussing a project for drilling oil in the Sahara.”

“In what language?” asks Chris.

“French,” says Bill.

“And what was the result?” asks Chris.

“We lost the contract,” says Bill.

“Oh,” says Chris, and tactfully changes the subject to his favourite topic of conversation — Chris Howland.

“Perhaps,” he says, “the producer will let me sing my current German hit record, because it’s very appropriate. It’s called Das Hab’ Ich in Paris Gelernt, which means ‘That’s what I learnt in Paris’.”

“But you’ve never been there,” says Bill.

“That’s where you’re wrong,” answers Chris. “I admit I only stayed 20 minutes between trains, but I proved a fast learner.”

“Then you’re out of practice tonight,” smiles Bill as he scoffs the last plump snail, leaving Chris nothing but a pile of empty shells.

“I don’t wish to be cruel.” says Chris, “but sometimes you make me wish that your grandmother’s ear-trumpet really had been struck by lightning.”

The post Howland v Grundy – c’est la guerre appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

IT started as a polite excuse for “taking the mickey” out of Army life. It has become one of television’s most rib-tickling comedies. The Army Game, originally intended to last only for the summer, has now been given an indefinite run. And with every fortnightly instalment it is building up new battalions of viewers.

What is the secret of its success? One very important reason could well be the judicious way in which each programme contains a carefully balanced mixture of the real and the imaginary.

The characters are the kind of men you would rarely meet in real life. The situations are all highly improbable. But although these are entirely fictional goings-on, every possible effort is made to see that they happen in surroundings that are true to life.

The man responsible for what we see of Nether Hopping is Granada designer Stanley Mills. The lifelike transit and surplus ordnance depot, with its huts and offices and parade ground, grows up from sketches on his drawing board.

Nether Hopping did not, however, start as just a figment of his imagination. It is made up of hundreds of different features which he has borrowed during visits to several Army camps, big and small, in various parts of the country.

I joined Stanley Mills and his sketchbook for a visit to a hutted camp “somewhere in Cheshire.” Never have I seen an artist with such an eye for detail.

He walked around the grounds noting the positions of stirrup pumps. In one of the huts he got out his steel measure and noted the dimensions of beds, lockers and wall brackets.

He was about to leave the hut when he noticed the door. He stopped and stared. But it was the turn of the off-duty troops in the hut to stop and stare when they heard him enthusing about that simple door.

“Just what I have been looking for,” he murmured, as out came the sketchbook and down went every little feature of the door, from type of knob to the size of the padlock and the shape of the panels.

Said Mills later: “Most of the ideas for the sets used in The Army Game have come from visits I have made to five camps, all of them different.

“One was a Guards training and transit camp, a permanent place that must be one of the biggest in the country. It had polished floors and central heating in each hut. It was very pleasant, and laid out in a most efficient way. But it was more like a garden city, and was much too nice for our purpose.

“Then, completely different, was a munitions dump. It was hidden away in a forest, and there was only a handful of men on the site. When I arrived — even though I had a War Office permit — they rushed around covering up all their maps and plans. A funny thing about that place is that the OC actually keeps pigs — just like our Major Upshot-Bagley.

“What we wanted was something between the Guards camp and the munitions dump. I think that in Nether Hopping we have succeeded.”

The huts used in The Army Game have been built by Granada carpenters from Stanley Mills’ designs. But the equipment that goes into them is all genuine Army issue — on loan.

From Ladysmith Barracks, headquarters of the Manchester Regiment at Ashton under-Lyne, have come beds, lockers and other barrack-room furniture — and a welfare radio set. Certain items of military equipment have been borrowed, too.

“Spud” Taylor, head of Granada’s property department, told me that only two things had to be specially made for the programme. One was a mock bomb which had a little charge in the tail. When a button was pressed it released a sheet of flame. The other was an illicit gin still which, as “Spud” rightly remarked, was not likely to be found in any ordinary Army camp.

In the early days of The Army Game, dummy rifles were used. But now, thanks to Ladysmith Barracks, they have the real things, even if they are unserviceable. Whether they work or not, however, Granada has to have licences for them. And when they occasionally borrow light machine-guns and other small arms, they have to take out separate licences and War Office permits.

The property department once failed to satisfy the programme’s requirements. That was when the script called for a pig. Two were tried. The smaller one was too noisy, and the bigger one turned out to be not much of an actor; he refused to go on when he was cued. Result: no more pigs.

I was in the studio just before this pig episode was rehearsed, and I remember the outburst of Geoffrey Sumner (who besides playing the pig-loving OC is a pig-keeper himself) when he caught sight of one of the porkers.

“I am quite devastated,” he told me. “I asked them to provide me with the kind pf pig I’ve been used to myself — a lop-eared Welsh. But this is a prick-eared Blue pig, which is a cross between a Wessex saddleback and a Large White.

“I made a special point of telling them what I wanted, because a lop-eared pig is much easier to handle than a prick-eared pig. It will be a feat of acting for me to fall in love with this mongrel.”

Fortunately, as it turned out, Geoffrey didn’t have to.

Only once have the people behind The Army Game had to search for something that was not authentic — and that was to work out unidentifiable regimental names.

After a lot of research it was decided that the commanding officer and the company sergeant-major should belong to the “Loamshires,” while the men were all to be in the “QRSBs.”

What does that stand for? Well, “QR” obviously means “Queen’s Royal,” but the rest is anybody’s guess.

The post Here’s why those ‘Army’ sets are so realistic appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

TELEVISION is making politics history. For, thanks to ITV, this is the first general election in which it is playing a major role.

The story of the campaign is being chronicled day by day in the news bulletins. Special programmes are being shown, which not only bring viewers face to face with the arguments and the personalities but also show how an election works and so help stimulate public interest.

What effect is all this having on voters? To what extent will people be influenced by what they have heard and seen over their TV sets when they go to the polls on October 8?

These are highly-important questions. The answers are eagerly awaited by the leaders of the political parties, for whom television is still something of an unknown factor, and by the TV executives, who are responsible for the special programmes that are being televised during the period of the election.

To find these answers – and find them quickly – a team of research workers who are making a special survey of TV and the election have called in the help of an electronic brain which they have named Lucifer.

This giant – £100,000-worth of winking lights, whirring wheels and miles of multi-coloured wires which link its thousands of brain cells – can work out in hours a mass of complicated statistics that would otherwise take a lifetime to compile.

Head of the survey is Joseph Trenaman, who recently took up the newly-created post of Granada Television Fellow at Leeds University after a mammoth four year task at Oxford analysing viewing habits for the Nuffield Foundation.

He told me: “Television is obviously having a greater effect on the voter than ever before. At the last general election, only 40 per cent of the population had a TV set. Now the figure is 70 per cent.

“Our purpose in the survey that is now under way is to discover how far the political broadcasts help and influence a person’s decision to vote and the way he votes. We want to find out what opinions they have of the political leaders they see talking to them from their TV screens.

“And, to learn how effective television is in putting over the Party line, we want to find out what people know and understand of the election issues.”

The survey, which is intended to show the effectiveness of TV electioneering in a general sense, is in fact being conducted in two Yorkshire constituencies. One is West Leeds; the other, Pudsey.

They have not been picked merely because of their nearness to Leeds University, headquarters of the survey. Said Joseph Trenaman: “There are several very good reasons why we chose them. For one thing, we wanted constituencies where there is a very close fight, which means a great deal of local political activity.

“In both constituencies the majority in previous elections has been about 5,000, with electorates of between 50,000 and 60,000. One had a Labour majority; the other a Conservative majority. And in both cases there are also Liberal candidates.

“Another reason is that at the last general election the proportion of the votes for the main parties in the two constituencies was roughly the same as in the national figure.”

One thousand people are being questioned during the survey. Their names are taken from the electoral register – one name is picked out of every 125 in the list – and each is the subject of a 15-minute interview. From each set of answers up to 40 independent facts are taken for feeding fito the electronic brain.

To see the brain in action I called on Dr A. S. Douglas, director of Leeds University electronic computing laboratory.

I found him in an old black-stone building with a high vaulted ceiling that was once a Baptist chapel. Sunlight filtered through the windows, only to be overpowered by batteries of fluorescent lamps that lit up the austere laboratory.

Where once stood rows of pews, now squatted steel-grey cabinets containing the brain’s intricate memory patterns. To a perpetual humming sound, green pinpoints of light flashed on the face of monitor screens on the control desk as reel after reel of punched tape were fed into the machine.

When the survey is over there will be more than 40,000 facts to be “swallowed” by the brain, converted into electrical charges and then to travel along the fine tracery of wires to be digested, analysed, compared and rejected … and finally produce masses of widely-assorted facts about TV and the election.

But the brain is not only being used to sort out the answers. It sets the questions, too!

Said Joseph Trenaman: “In fact, we could not have done without it. We started off with a preliminary survey to find out what questions we ought to ask. Instead of sitting in our office and thinking up what we regarded as the right questions, we invited groups of people – as many as 60 at a time – to watch telerecordings of party political broadcasts, and talked to them afterwards.

“What we learned was fed into the machine – and then it was left to work out the most acceptable questions.

“The brain works at the rate of 1,000 operations a minute, and it took just an hour to give us the list of questions. Without its help, we would not have been ready in time and this survey, which we think as of tremendous importance, would never have taken place.”

The post Lucifer throws a light on TV electioneering appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

THERE is nothing very special about the Nether Hopping transit camp and surplus ordnance depot. Motorists passing by as they speed along the arterial road never give it a second glance.

It is a ramshackle, miserable-looking hutment camp, three miles from the nearest village and 10 from the nearest town. A camp forgotten by the War Office, where life follows the same lazy routine.

This is the scene of Granada’s new fortnightly comedy, The Army Game.

The peace of Nether Hopping is, however, rudely shattered by the arrival of five newcomers.

“Fly” boy of the outfit is Cockney Cpl. Springer, played by Michael Medwin. He’s the type who sizes up the situation in his first three days in the Army and decides that the rest of the two years will be one long scrounge.

Only regular among them is Pte. Brisley (Alfie Bass) who is called “Bootsie” because he’s been excused boots for most of his Service life. He’s the pessimist of the group.

Then there’s Pte. Hatchett (Charles Hawtrey), who for obvious reasons is nicknamed “Professor.” He’s the barrack-room lawyer.

Pte. Popplewell (Bernard Bresslaw), better known as “Popeye,” is a giant who represents the brute strength of the quintet.

Finally there is Pte. Cook who, on the strength of all the parcels he receives from his fond mother, has the nickname “Cup Cake.”

Collectively, the five are a major threat to the smooth running of any camp – a quality which has kept them on the move. They are determined that their travels must end. But they haven’t counted on Company Sergeant-Major Bullimore (William Hartnell). He does his best to run Nether Hopping on service lines, but he is getting rather tired of the effort.

It is inevitable that a meeting between such a group and a man like Bullimore should be the start of a private war in which no quarter is given and none asked.

Quite happy to let the sergeant-major run the camp his own way is the O.C. Major Upshott-Bagley (Geoffrey Sumner) realised that when he was given the least responsible job the War Office could find for him he had reached the pinnacle of his career. He is content to vegetate until he is pensioned off.

The Army Game has been devised as a riotous comedy – but it is not a farce. The situations may be a little larger than life, but they are based on incidents that could happen in any Army camp.

In this all-male cast, Granada have found people who look the part and who can act the part from personal experience.

Geoffrey Sumner, for instance, joined the Army in 1939 as a second-lieutenant and finished up in New Delhi as a colonel.

Bernard Bresslaw feels quite in character as one of the inmates of Hut 29. He was a private in the RASC. And William Hartnell had a private’s-eye view of the war in the Tank Corps. His promotion didn’t come until he left the Army in 1943 and Carol Reed made him a sergeant for his part in The Way Ahead.

Alfie Bass was a dispatch rider. About the characters in The Army Game he says: They could be real people.”

Scriptwriter Sid Colin was in the RAF. To make sure he gets his technical facts right, Granada have appointed a military adviser, Major John Foley. And the War Office have provided a liaison officer and given him permission to visit any Army camp he likes in search of authentic material.

The post ITV joins the army appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

WITH his incredible exposé of the activities of “The Organisation” in Granada’s new People and Places, Peter Jones is at last beginning to shake the complacency of the Great British Public.

His tingling allegations about the ramifications of this octopus-like movement are intended to shock viewers into believing that there really is some guiding force behind the seemingly-inexplicable misfortunes of daily life. And he is succeeding.

Already people are starting to wonder whether it is possible that such an “Organisation” actually exists. I know that was the question I asked myself after the first edition of People and Places, only to dismiss the whole affair as just a figment of Jones’ brilliant imagination.

But now I’m not so sure… I began to have my doubts when I heard from Jones and fellow-investigator, Peter Moore, how they discovered the insidious way “The Organisation” operated.

Said Jones: “It began two years ago when we were thinking of doing a radio serial about a man who was trying to get a telephone for his house and who at every turn faced with some obstruction.”

“We felt,” added Moore, “that this was organised obstruction. That all the difficulties were there by design, not accident.”

“Since then we have carried out detailed research,” continued Jones. “There have been hazards, of course, but they have been bravely faced. We have suffered like martyrs to a cause. But we have secured evidence to show that “The Organisation” does exist, and that its aim is to make life intolerable for those who are not members of it.”

He opened his safe and let me see some examples of the more everyday activities of “The Organisation” which have already been shown to viewers. The banana skin that had been placed where someone was bound to step. The fish knife with the hollow decoration in which bits of food could lodge and cause poisoning. The tomato sauce bottle in which a lump of sauce had been wedged so that an attempt to coax it out flooded the plate.

The two Peters were making it sound horribly real. I tried to argue with myself that it was all too far-fetched, that they had conjured up a mythical “Organisation” because it was a paying proposition… until I found the cheques they are getting from Granada for telling viewers about it are being ploughed back to finance further investigation.

Peter Jones may have made a name as a comic, but I found that in this crusade he is deadly serious.

Some of the examples of “The Organisation’s” work he takes from his files may appear amusing. But, as he grimly pointed out, they were far from funny to their victims.

Already they have secured a mass of evidence. They have films, tape recordings, affidavits. Many witnesses have been interviewed. Some are being persuaded to appear on the programme.

But their main catch is a deviationist who has seen the light. Said Peter Jones: “We cannot divulge his name, not only for his own sake but for that of his wife and family, who are still in “The Organisation.”

They have pieced together some of the history of “The Organisation.” From revelations associated with the Mopungo Fragment, they have evidence that it was operating as long ago as 4,000 B.C. And they have frightening news of the way it has been building up its membership, particularly since the war.

“Watch your neighbour closely,” said Peter Moore. “It is quite likely he is in ‘The Organisation’.”

“Be warned if one of your family tries to switch off this programme,” said Peter Jones. “He is obviously trying to suppress evidence.”

As may be expected, these disclosures are worrying “The Organisation” and strenuous efforts are being made to plug the leak. There have been several attempts to stop the programme going on the air.

Said Peter Jones: “When we were engaged to come to Manchester for People and Places we were put on the wrong sleeper-train and woke in the morning in a siding at Rugby.”

This, and later occurrences they told me about, were in themselves convincing proof of “The Organisation’s” existence.

But any remaining doubts I might have had vanished as a result of things that happened while I was interviewing the two Peters.

On three occasions my photographer’s negatives were spoiled because the flash mechanism refused to operate, although it had worked without a hitch when he tested it. Then my pen ran dry.

Finally, after the photographer had managed to take the pictures on this page, he found the viewfinder of his new camera had mysteriously shattered.

And even now, back in the office and typing this story, I have horrible suspicions that I am being watched and that evertsya ghrбspo wijiity woooots.

The post It’s ‘The Organisation’ that does it appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.