WHO would have foreseen, a few years ago, the part which television would come to play in people’s lives? Here, suddenly, is a medium which appears to have cut right across the different levels, prejudices and customs of the country. People who do not take the same newspapers, go to the same cinemas or theatres, or read the same books, have found an unexpected point of contact. Since the introduction of television millions of people discuss the same thing each day: in its own way it has made an unexplosive but profound revolution in the national life.

The coming of Independent Television to England didn’t alter the medium, it merely made it more competitive, unpredictable and exciting. With so new a vehicle of communication the problems facing all its innovators have been much the same; for this reason we thought it might be interesting and enlightening to record the early experiences of one British independent television programme company.

This small book is about the first year of Granada TV Network Limited, which is the Company allotted the job of giving television on weekdays to a large area of the North of England. In terms of the short life-story of television to date, what it records is already ancient history. Granada has since celebrated a second birthday. The reason for the delay in putting it out has been honest doubt. On balance we have decided it may interest or amuse a sufficient number of people, if only as a museum-piece. The material in the Reference Section may also retain some curiosity value in the same sort of way as a superannuated Whitaker.

This is certainly not a history, in the sense of being either comprehensive or conclusive. Really it is no more than a brief, light-hearted description — seen through various pairs of eyes — of the early struggles of a new company with a still adolescent medium. Bear in mind in reading it that most of it was written many months ago, which is why some of what it says may already carry bygone echoes. One day this account may well seem as strange, remote and slightly comical as pictures of the Wright Brothers’ aeroplane seem to us today.

June 1, 1958

FOREWORD

By Sir Kenneth Clark, KCB
Sometime Chairman of the Independent Television Authority
Chairman of the Arts Council of Great Britain

WHEN the Independent Television Authority appointed Granada to the Northern Station we had no doubt that they would give us lively and intelligent programmes. But we did not quite foresee how much Granada would develop a character which distinguishes it most markedly from the other programme companies and from the BBC. This character may be described as immediacy. Granada believes in today. It looks at the problems of modern life, to which middle-aged people try to close their eyes; it recognizes that a new world is being born which must speak its mind and if necessary shake its fist at the old one. Lively-minded people want to question the established order at any time; but for us, who are two-thirds the way through a great social revolution, it is a necessity to ‘try all things’. Granada puts ideas and institutions to the test in its discussions and eager questionings, and it forces us to examine our assumptions by its admirable productions of plays by Arthur Miller and other vital dramatists.

In addition to all this it discharges the first function of Television, to entertain us intelligently.

THE FIRST YEAR

INDEPENDENT television in Britain began in a hurry. From the first, it was criticized for its preoccupation — vital, indeed, to its existence — with a mass audience, and for finding in too much ‘light entertainment’ the easiest way of attracting and holding such an audience.

Granada TV Network began to broadcast seven months after the start of independent television. It thus had the advantage of watching, and learning something from, the experience of other programme-companies.

It also had one disadvantage. Because independent television was criticized for excessive ‘lightness’ and so for failing to provide (as the Television Act required) balanced programmes, its spokesmen, including the Chairman of the Independent Television Authority himself, claimed that the balance of the programmes could be judged fairly only when a full national network was in operation and openly looked to Granada, in advance, to provide the balance required.

Therefore, it was assumed by some that the Granada programmes would be predominantly ‘highbrow’ in character — ‘ITV’s Third Programme’, as one critic put it.

This is a fundamental misconception of Granada’s aim and method. Granada is concerned simply to try to ensure that every one of its programmes, whatever its kind, should be good of that kind.

It has indeed broadcast a number of programmes, unlike anything done in British television before, which have been praised by the serious reviews: two examples of this sort of programme are Under Fire and What the Papers Say. But the important difference between such programmes and broadcasts deliberately directed (like some items in the BBC’s Third Programme) to small specialist minorities, is that these programmes, often dealing as they do with serious subjects, have proved their power to interest ordinary non-specialist viewers — the readers of the News Chronicle or the Daily Mirror as well as the readers of the Manchester Guardian.

Such programmes can legitimately be called experimental; and Granada, like television itself, is still very much in its experimental stage. It has certain principles, certain standards of quality; and these are applied at every ‘level’, from a new quiz game to drama.

In short, Granada seeks always to avoid the shoddy and hackneyed, to encourage and explore the fresh and genuine. It has an appetite for new ideas and new talent — and for the best of the old, too: television has shown that millions of people who had hardly heard of Ibsen or Strindberg, and had never been to a living theatre to see a play on some such controversial theme as the colour bar, can be attracted by serious drama as well as by light variety.

It is hardly too pretentious to claim, then, that television at its best can be an educative force, not a social evil; not a mere escape from reality but a release into wider reality and more abundant imaginative life; not an anaesthetic but a stimulant.

How far Granada has succeeded, in its first year, in beginning to realize its aims can hardly be judged by those within the Granada organization: that is why this series consists mainly of the views of others.

The post An introduction to Granada appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

THE habit of identifying persons, organizations, products, ranks and honours by groups of initial letters has become so common today that a question on the subject is a stock feature of the general paper in most examinations.

There are so many initials in the world of films, radio and television that it is very pleasant to come upon a proper name, particularly such a gracious name as Granada. The attention is at once arrested. There is an immediate sense of personality and colour. Granada, one feels, is an individual, whereas ITA remains a dim authority. What is this Granada? people want to know. What does it stand for? What is the history behind its enterprising television programmes? Has it been interested in theatre, films and music before?

I have known Granada for more than a quarter of a century, and should like to answer some of these questions. I want to tell you something about the Company’s tradition, and suggest one or two reasons why the Independent Television Authority, when allotting geographical regions to the various programme contractors, had no hesitation in giving Granada the coveted Northern area for which it had applied.

The application in itself is interesting, and shows the way the minds behind the company work. There is no Granada cinema north of a line between Shrewsbury and Oswestry. But when the moment for television came, ringing with it new, wider possibilities for good music, theatre, ballet, children’s programmes, it was decided to strike north into fresh territory, where the population is dense and homogeneous, and enthusiasm for culture high.

Here, in the South, we have long known the Granada group as a body whose force is out of all proportion to its comparatively small stature. The first Granada theatre opened in Dover at the beginning of 1930. The latest opened in Brixton at the beginning of 1957. There are now sixty theatres in the circuit, and each is a personality in its own neighbourhood. Its programmes are not quite like other programmes.

They run popular films against all the regular pattern of release. The King and I, for instance, was not shipped off the screen after six days, but was allowed to take its full course, like a stage production, in all theatres. It ran five weeks, for instance, at the Granada, Hounslow, breaking all records for a suburban release house.

There is no film of quality, long or short, that Granada won’t play, no matter how cold the shoulder turned on it by bigger circuits. So we had, through Granada, the first real introduction to Eartha Kitt in the film New Faces. We had Ed Murrow’s African Conflict, made for American television. We had a chance to look again at Thursday’s Children, our own touching documentary about the training of deaf-and-dumb children, which seemed to have disappeared without trace after its first west-end showing. We had a circuit release of Time Out of War, a wonderful little film about a human interlude on a hot summer’s afternoon during the Scarlett O’Hara war, which was awarded one of the most coveted prestige prizes at the Edinburgh Festival. We saw all these things because the people behind the Granada group have a fixed notion that audiences are a lot more grown-up than they are generally supposed to be.

The choice of the name ‘Granada’ has no particular significance. It was the result of a haphazard whim, sprung from a natural dislike of cold initials and affectionate memories of holidays spent in that pleasant old Spanish town. Once upon a time, I remember, the opening of a new Granada theatre was accompanied by an injunction to patrons to pronounce the name ‘Grar-nar-dar’ and not to rhyme with Canada.

From the beginning the Granada group has set out to be selective. It brought into theatre design such artists as Komisarjevsky, Frank Dobson, Roger Furse, Vladimir Polunin. It brought over Rene Clair’s Le Million from Paris to London. It showed the abstract films of Len Lye a full quarter of a century before the highbrows began to rave about Norman McLaren’s witty little firecrackers.

It was the first group, starting in 1925, to put on stage plays, ballets, opera, ice-shows and pantomime, and to present concerts both classical and popular. It was also the first group to give special matinees for children. As I write I have in front of me a glossy little throwaway, dated 1927, headed ‘At Last!’ and continuing: ‘To Parents and Teachers. We know that you do not really like the idea of your children going to see all the “grown-up” pictures, so we have decided to give Special Programmes for Children starting on Saturday morning. You can rest assured that we shall show your children pictures that will really teach them something as well as entertain them—clean and healthy pictures that will do them nothing but good.’

Later on, of course, other theatre circuits took up the idea of Saturday morning shows, until now they are a normal feature of cinema life. But Granada has always watched over its children’s programmes with a special care, inviting comments from school teachers and commissioning reports by psychiatrists. Children, it is argued, do not live in an ivory tower. If the pattern of their home and school life is normal, Saturday morning at the pictures is only a part, a continuation of their week. A grave responsibility falls on the provider of entertainment, whether on the cinema screen or on the television screen, to fit wholesomely and constructively into that pattern.

Another feature of Granada Theatres is the information given to the public. It is a ‘must’ to display in every foyer a full cast-list of the pictures showing, with credits to director, writer and leading technicians. Regularly, every week, the Manager of a Granada writes an informal letter to the Managing Director, describing every incident, no matter how trivial; the comments he has overheard, the remarks made to him by patrons, the ‘feeling’ of the house, the proportion of carriage trade to casual trade, the number of laughs and coughs, the hundred little oddities that go to make up a manager’s week.

Regularly too, each week, a letter is sent from Head Office to the managers, telling them exactly what the group is doing, not only in films but in television. Every week prizes are awarded to managers for good ideas in exploitation. The number of these prizes is unlimited. There are as many prizes as there are good ideas. Since there is no competition, there is no jealousy, only a stimulus to originality and enterprise. There is also a fair amount of friendly chaff, of good-natured give-and-take, the sort of congenial exchange that is only to be found in relatively small and happy companies.

Professionally speaking, film critics don’t have favourite theatres. They go, in honour bound, wherever the new films take them. It may be to a west-end palais-de-luxe, or to some small, specialized hall with a bad rake, cramped seats and inadequate smoke extraction.

But even film critics have a private life, and when they are not on duty choose their pleasures as they please. I live in an outer London suburb, where there are at least half-a-dozen cinemas within reach.

Of these half-dozen our Granada is the furthest off. But through the years, as the result of experience, I and my family have become Granada fans. What’s on at the Granada this week? is the first thing we ask when anyone opens the local paper at the entertainments page. We’d rather go to the Granada.

Miss C. A. Lejeune is Film Critic of The Observer

The post The Granada Theatres appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

THE creation of a large organization is usually a slow evolutionary process. Small beginnings are nurtured by experience, guided by precedent and enlarged by expansion or acquisition. This is true of the industrial complex, the machine of government, the voluntary organization, and the commercial enterprise. It is not true, however, of the establishment of Granada tv Network.

In May 1954, Granada Television consisted merely of a decision. This decision was that Granada Theatres should enter television, and it was taken when the Television Bill, which was to embody in statute the scope, the duties, function and methods of Independent Television, was still being debated and amended in the House of Commons. The Bill did not become law until July 1954.

In May 1955, one year later, the contract was signed which laid on Granada the responsibility for providing a weekday television service for the North of England. At this stage, apart from a contractual obligation, Granada TV consisted of little more than a general idea of what the new television service should seek to attain. There were no tools with which to carry out this idea: no studio, no electronic equipment, not a single camera; no directors, electricians, camera-men, sound and vision mixers, typists, or designers. The craftsmen, technologists, administrators and creative workers who were to create Granada Television were working at other jobs in Manchester, Toronto, London, Liverpool and New York, many of them unaware that their future lay in television.

Just a year after the contract was signed, the first Granada transmission went on the air from the most modern television centre in Europe — a building which is eight months had risen on a waste plot of ground in Quay Street, Manchester, the first building in Britain expressly designed for television. It was bright, spanking and shiny new, from the electric control lighting panel to the ash-trays; from the unique lighting grid in the studio (festoons of lamps hung on telescopic battens) to the smallest valve in the master control-room.

This year of construction and creation had been hard and difficult. The Quay Street site was bought in May 1955. It was 4½ acres in size. Only half an acre was needed for the first stages of building, but the plan was to build a compact, comprehensive television centre embodying studios and workshops and offices. The first problem was to build the first section of this centre on the half-acre site, and to build it to a tight schedule during the winter months of bad weather, when it rained for days on end and the ground was churned into a muddy morass.

The first thing built was a wooden hut: in this the newly appointed Northern Administrator of Granada set up office with a secretary, a desk, and a couple of chairs. Then the skeleton of the building began to rise under the direction and drive of the building foreman, an Irishman who hustled, cajoled, and struggled to keep to the time-table despite occasional setbacks.

As the building took shape the staff grew. Instead of the hut a warehouse opposite, with 30,000 square feet of floor space, was taken over to be turned into offices. The whole building had to be gutted and rebuilt inside; at first the only offices were on the third floor, where a handful of people coped with a hundred jobs.

More formidable even than the physical problem of building were the problems of public relations: Granada TV, itself a new community, had to be established, even before opening day, as a recognized feature of Northern life; public authorities, prominent citizens of the North, and the Press had to be contacted and their support — or at least their friendly interest — secured.

The background to all this was a somewhat confused general public reaction to independent television. The new services had opened in London in September 1955, and in the Midlands in February 1956. Many viewers were eager and receptive. Some sections of the Press were hostile. Advertisers, after the first few months, had begun to approach the new medium more cautiously. Rumours were publicized about losses suffered by the companies already operating; there were newspaper criticisms of extravagance. It was assiduously suggested in some quarters that independent television was a gamble without a future. All this shook confidence, and did not make it easy to work creatively on the myriad problems of planning, building, and establishing a new service in the North. But enthusiasm grew as the organization began to take shape. Programme planning went ahead; there were difficult and even tense negotiations for the networking of programmes with the companies already operating; and actual Granada programmes were scripted, rehearsed, and tested.

Granada’s policy was, and still is, not to publish a mass of advance information about the content of new programmes. Before opening day both the Press and the advertisers were persistent in their demands to know what was being planned. Rumour and speculation spread, but Granada insisted that realization was better than anticipation, and that the new service would speak for itself and must be judged by results not blurbs.

At the same time people had to be recruited and trained. Above all, methods, drills and systems had to be worked out, tried and rehearsed; for television is an association between technology and the creative arts, dovetailed and timed to a second.

When the day’s transmission starts, there are 25,200 seconds to go before the signing-off signal; for time, in television, is measured in seconds rather than in minutes or hours. The immediacy of the medium means that the instant an image is received by the camera it is seen on the screen in the home. There is no time for revision or second thoughts. In newspaper production or moviemaking. the finished product is seen by its creator before it is seen by its consumer. In television, creator and consumer receive an identical image at the same moment. If an actor fails his cue, five million viewers see him fail. If a scene-shifter drops a chair, millions of people hear it fall. The producers and technicians cannot say: ‘Stop. Now do it again.’

So the essence of television is pre-planning, the perfection of split-second drills so that everyone knows where he is, what he is to do, and why — and what to do in an emergency. In devising a technique and method of this fine degree of accuracy, there was relatively little experience and precedent to go by. It was not possible to create a system simply by adopting or copying rules and formulae well-tried elsewhere. So to the problem of recruitment was added that of training, and then that of coordination, of fitting the units into an effective whole.

The method followed was to decide, in outline, the various departmental responsibilities and functions, and then to engage for each department at least one expert whose job it was to recruit and train his staff and evolve the systems and methods by which they would work. The departments, roughed out in this way, were: Programming, Production, Engineering, Sales and Advertising, Film Operations, Network Operation, and Press and Publicity; managerial departments were responsible for Accounts, Personnel and General Administration. A short description of the main departments will give some idea of how a television service works; but the departments cannot be arranged in any order of priority, because each is integrally dependent on the others. It is simplest, therefore, to trace a new programme through its earlier stages.

The creative centre of a television company is its Programmme Department. Here ideas are conceived, shaped and developed into programmes by producers, directors and writers.

When a programme begins to take definite form, a period of rehearsal and experiment follows. A script is prepared and details of cast, costume, scenery, make-up and music worked out. At this stage, the Production Department adds its services to those of the Programme Planners and Directors. In co-operation with the Programme Department the Production Department is responsible for scheduling and equipping a programme for the cameras. This department organizes the construction of sets and provision of properties, wardrobe and make-up, and allocates studio space for rehearsals and final performance.

Even when a series programme is scripted, cast, clothed and rehearsed, it is still some way from transmission. Next comes a phase of assessment and appraisal. The Engineering Department transmits the programme on a closed circuit, so that it can be seen by executives as it may later be seen in millions of homes. The decisions made at this stage determine the future of the programme.

If it turns out to be altogether below standard, it will be scrapped or sent back for improvement.

If it seems right in content, casting and direction, it will be shown. This, however, is not just a matter of fixing a day and time and leaving it at that. The new programme, or series, will have to be fitted into the complex jigsaw of a programme schedule—and the details of this are arranged by another department, the Network Operations Department.

The programmes fed from the Manchester TV Centre to the transmitters at Winter Hill in Lancashire and Emley Moor in Yorkshire, come from several sources. Live broadcasts come, in the main, from the Granada Studios or from the Granada Travelling Eyes. Other live programmes come on network from the studios of other programme companies. National and international news comes from the studios of Independent Television News, a company owned collectively by all the programme companies. Local news comes from the Granada studios in Manchester. Film — which may either be a feature film, one of a series, a filmed advertisement, or an interview or exterior shot in a play or documentary — is prepared by the Film Operations Department and transmitted by the Telecine Department.

The Network Operations Department controls and co-ordinates all this material. This involves both technical and administrative work, the linking of one source with another — Granada studios with the network studios, with Telecine, and with Travelling Eye — and the preparation of precise time-tables.

The Film Operations Department is another important part of the machine. It collects the various film items from advertisers, film studios and film libraries, checks them for quality, content and length, and makes them up into continuous runs of film ready for transmission. Again, as throughout all television, timing is by the fraction of the second.

In one year this whole organization was devised, recruited, trained and set to creative work. Special training was needed in all departments. Eighty per cent of the engineers had never even been in a television studio before: they came from the workshops and assembly-lines of industry, from recording studios and from sound-broadcasting studios and control rooms. Production staff came from films, sound-radio and stage. It was not enough to tell these new-comers to follow instructions automatically. They had to learn to understand and appreciate the work of all the departments — the others as well as their own. They had to be as adaptable and flexible as the medium itself.

Studios in London, normally used for testing television equipment, were taken over by Granada for a nine-week training course which started in January 1956, fourteen weeks before the opening. Here operational studio conditions were simulated to give authenticity to training. Lectures were given on engineering and production problems. Trainees were taught the principles of lighting, scripting, designing, casting, programme-building, floor-planning, staging and the use of film and music. Then came the practical exercise: teams, each consisting of director, floor-manager and production-secretary, prepared and presented short plays, panel-games, musical programmes and interviews.

Camera-men were trained. Vision-control engineers mastered their new machinery and then studied the more personal task of making a good picture on the screen. Not one experienced microphone-operator was available: sound-crews were selected and trained to follow the sound action smoothly while keeping microphones and boom-shadows out of camera range. Vision-mixer/gramophone-operators learned their craft by constant exercise and practice.

At the end of the nine weeks, the trainees designed and produced their own original programmes and transmitted them on a closed circuit.

Meanwhile the Travelling Eye teams were being assembled and trained. Two units were designed and built for Granada. They were, in effect, studios on wheels, complete with cameras and microphones and linked to the transmitters by radio and visual lines of communication. They had also to be serviced by mobile power generators for occasions when it would not be possible to use the normal power supply.

The Travelling Eye teams were first trained in London in the techniques of handling and maintaining their equipment. After one month of this basic training they moved north to transmit ‘dummy’ outside broadcasts, from Manchester, Liverpool, Preston and Wigan, from outdoor sites and from inside buildings, practising in every sort of situation which they would be likely to meet once Granada transmission started.

On May 3, 1956, only a few weeks after the course had finished, these newly graduated trainees brought Independent Television for the first time to the people of the North.

The post A TV service is born appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

TWELVE months before Granada went on the air, work started on the design of the new building for the TV Centre — twelve months which were to be anxious and hectic but stimulating and enjoyable. For the complexity of the problems, this gave a very short time. It was immediately decided, therefore, that the Centre would have to be developed in carefully programmed phases, building just what was essential to provide an efficient working unit by the fateful date of May 3, 1956, at the same time having a Master Plan for the development of the site as a whole.

It was important that the first stage should not prejudice a fine grouping of buildings in the completed scheme — if it can be said that building for such a new and developing thing as television is ever completed. Indeed, from the purely architectural point of view, one of the major problems is to prepare a design which, at each stage of its development, will be visually satisfying.

It is usually found that the architecture we like best has a basic simplicity; and this applies to the new architecture we build today as much as to the historic buildings of the past. So it is the aim that the tv Centre, as it grows, shall always retain a noble simplicity, so far as this is possible. The main buildings will thus be kept simple in outline and will rely for their effect on the subtlety of their proportions and the texture of their walls.

But though the architectural form may be simple, it should not be forgotten that these walls enclose the most complex processes.

Before the first sketch designs were prepared, a careful study had to be made of all the activities for which it was necessary to plan, and these activities were very varying in nature. In one part of the building carpenters would be hard at work with their sawmills preparing the sets, in another actors would be preparing for their appearance in their dressing-rooms and make-up rooms; control suites were required for the studios and rooms to house the electronic apparatus and to maintain this infinitely complex equipment; and then the studios themselves presented many problems which needed to be carefully analysed before their design was finally completed.

In addition, however, to consideration of the technical problems of those working in the building, much thought has been given to quite a different aspect of the TV Centre. How could provision be made for the people of Manchester to come within its walls and see the fascinating process of producing Television programmes? It was felt that the Centre should be a place in which members of the public should be welcome and that facilities should be provided for them to view the whole of the process, both creative and technical, which goes on in the Centre, while, at the same time, not disturbing its efficient operation. This added a complicated element to the planning problems. But, although it was not possible to carry this idea into effect in the first phase already built, the plans for future development include this special provision for the public. A large foyer with a buffet on the first floor will have windows into the new large studio and public galleries will run around the studio with glazed walls giving a full view of the studio and control rooms. In this way, whoever wishes to do so will be able to get an insight into the inner workings of television and will be able to visit the Centre as a welcome guest.

But from thoughts of the future plans, let us return to the construction of the first building and to August 1955 when the contractor first started work on the site. Only seven months were available before the completed building was to be handed over to the electronic engineers for them to instal their equipment—and these were winter months which we did not know at the start were going to be some of the coldest on record! Large pre-cast concrete units were designed to form the main frame of the building as these could be made away from the site and delivered for immediate erection as soon as the foundations were ready. The days had to be lengthened with floodlights and the cold was a severe handicap. However, the difficulties were overcome and the building was completed on time.

Building work has continued; the third phase is in construction. This time far larger structures will be rising on the site which I hope may not only efficiently serve their technical purpose, but by their simplicity of form, richness of tone and texture and relation one to another may also give to all who pass a sense of visual delight and a thrill of pleasure.

The post The building of the Manchester TV centre appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

ON May 3, 1956, at 7.30 p.m., Granada TV Network went on the air with this opening announcement: ‘From the North, this is Granada — on Channel 9. A year ago Granada was a blue-print, a promise. Tonight the North has a new television service created by the devotion and hard work of thousands of Northerners and friends from all over the world. Come with us now — to meet the people.’

This expressed the mood of Granada’s approach. The new service was for the people — and so Granada’s first programme featured the people. Quentin Reynolds, the American writer, known to millions in Britain for his wartime broadcasts, introduced some of the people who had worked behind the scenes to put Granada on the air — the building foreman, the architect, a telephone operator and an engineer, for example. Then he introduced the Lord Mayor of Manchester (Alderman Tom Regan) and the Chairman of the Independent Television Authority (Sir Kenneth Clark). Jack Hylton and Gracie Fields brought the friendly greetings of people in show business. But there was no long, pretentious inaugural ceremony.

Granada then presented a typical evening’s viewing — the aim being to show viewers what they could normally expect to see rather than to raise false hopes by the presentation of the extravagant and the spectacular. The evening’s viewing included a variety programme, ‘London salutes Lancashire’, featuring Arthur Askey, Bob Monkhouse and Dennis Goodwin, Pat Kirkwood and Lena Horne.

At the end of the evening, Granada presented ‘Tribute to the BBC’. This was an acknowledgment of the debt which television in Britain and the world owes to the pioneers who at Alexandra Palace initiated and evolved public-service television. This programme was produced by the BBC and compered by Aidan Crawley. Among those taking part were Sir George Barnes, then head of BBC Television, Gilbert Harding, and Sir Mortimer Wheeler.

‘For most of you tonight’, said an announcer, ‘Independent Television has been a new experience.That evening, too, Granada faced its most controversial task — the presentation of advertising to people who had never before seen it on television: on their approval or disapproval hung the future of the new service.

‘We have brought advertisements to your television screens at home. We think you will like them, not only because they are entertaining but because they are informative. Products and services, whose names you will be seeing, are a guide to sensible buying and will help you to get value for your money. Television advertisers have faith and pride in what they offer. Granada stands behind them and their statements. We hope their names will become as familiar to you as the names of your friends and neighbours. You can use Granada advertisements as a trustworthy guide to wise spending.

‘Wise spending eventually saves money. And savings can help deal with one aspect of our country’s economic problems. So before we shop let us say to ourselves “is it essential?” If it is let us buy the best we can afford, if it is not essential can we save? Save not only for a rainy day but also to make sure that tomorrow and the day after will be sunny.’

Finally there was a word on behalf of those for whom this evening had been the first big test:

‘This has been opening night. We have all been working around the clock for months to make it possible, and we have all been nervous and tense. If we slipped here and there during this evening’s transmission, we hope you will forgive us… and now, goodnight all, goodnight.’ After the big night came the reaction from the North. Here is the comment of the Manchester Evening News:

‘It was altogether a more imaginative opening night than the first night in London or Birmingham. The idea of informally introducing a variety of men who had contributed to the delivery of Granada was good. So was the notion of a tribute to the BBC…. Serious in mood, entertaining to the eye, this was television interviewing at its best. Nothing extravagant, nothing boastful. There are other improvements to report. The breaks before and after a group of advertisements are well defined. They are presented more smoothly. And Granada’s programmes were better controlled than those on the first nights in London and the Midlands.’

And here are some immediate comments by viewers reported next day in the newspapers: ‘It’s so slick’, ‘superb entertainment’, ‘better than the BBC’, ‘wonderful reception’.

That, then, was the start—direct and down-to-earth, as is appropriate in a service for the people of the North. This was Granada — from the North.

The post The Big Night appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

BEFORE it is possible to make any sort of assessment of Granada’s contribution to the Drama, it is essential, I think, to recognize the nature of television itself.

Television is a means of dissemination, of, quite literally, broadcasting. What it broadcasts is a sort of film. The basic material of the medium, the picture on the screen, is exactly the same as in the cinema. It is also, of course, a method of production for film which has the advantages of speed and cheapness. Once these truisms are honestly acknowledged it becomes easier to see what it can do best, how it can speak most potently. First, it has a sense of intimacy unrivalled in any other field of entertainment. With this intimacy goes a ruthless concentration. In every home the little screen can be flicked off with the turn of a knob. In this lies the real challenge to every production company, to rivet the amorphous polyglot audience from the distractions of its own home, or from the cumulative tedium of an evening’s programmes. In the answer to this lay Granada’s choice of Look Back in Anger, their first major production, and, to a large extent, their whole dramatic policy.

When Granada first considered the production of Look Back in Anger it was the most controversial play in England. The first reviews of it in the theatre had quickly written it off with calm superiority as a piece of jejune unpleasantness. Only the Observer and the Sunday Times originally recognized it as the work of a major new English dramatist. Despite its successful run, however, it had not penetrated beyond a fairly specialized audience. The insulation of the English theatre from life, from real people and from real issues, had accounted for its original reception. Here was a play speaking from a particular and very passionate point of view. It was just this passion, this arrogance if you like, that not only made it controversial but made it speak to the wider audience — an audience that does not normally find its way into the theatres. Granada had learnt a lesson that the American cinema, amongst others, has taught over and over again — that controversy of any sort can be one of the most potent attractions in entertainment. If an audience can be stirred or angered, it cannot dismiss. This pursuit of controversy has outlined nearly all the Granada productions. Shooting Star was a story of corruption in the football industry; Home of the Brave was a study of the colour problem. Significantly, when it was a question of presenting Ibsen, Granada plumped for An Enemy of the People, where again the issue is social — a single man who for the sake of his conscience fights and opposes a whole community.

No less than the themes of the individual plays themselves, Granada’s sense of the controversial has been reflected in its choice of writers. Besides John Osborne, it chose Arthur Miller’s adaptation of An Enemy of the People and presented the first English production of Another Part of the Forest, a study in Southern corruption and decay by the important American dramatist Lilian Heilman.

It would, of course, be foolish to say that the level of all Granada productions has been the same. It is noticeable, though, that Granada’s greatest successes as measured by any standards, press reception or viewing figures, have been in the production of the more significant and controversial plays. Granada’s failures have been in the occasional attempt to transfer from stage to screen the conventional play or the stage comedy with its highly artificial laws, manner, and stereotypes.

The problem, however, of finding original writers for television is one which it has not yet begun to tackle. This is absolutely vital. Television’s greatest success in America has been when it has used its own talents like Paddy Chayefsky and Reginald Rose. English writers must be discovered — not geniuses, not the exceptional talent, but honest solid professionals.

Similarly, with directors, undoubtedly the most important and the most ably professional work in television has been done in North America. Granada rightly brought directors from Canada to Britain and they have set a standard easily surpassing the BBC and Granada’s commercial competitors. For the future it is necessary that lively new directors should be discovered and developed in an organization which gives them both scope and support.

Here perhaps I may be allowed a personal digression. When Granada first asked me to direct Look Back in Anger on television I thought of it as primarily a technical assignment. I had already staged the play in the theatre, and I had re-rehearsed several replacements in the cast. For television it would be a question, I imagined, of planning the shots, arranging the cameras, composing sequences. When I began to replot the play for the cameras, however, I found just the contrary — a quite exceptional sense of freedom. Technically, I hardly had to think consciously about it at all. More than any other television show I had directed, technical questions became almost irrelevant; problems were solved even before they were posed; form became completely dominated by content. It was a question merely of bringing out this moment, underlining that value. The result was a production liberated from the orthodox conventions of television grammar.

Every medium must, of course, have a grammar even if it only acts as a safeguard. The grammar of television is based on that of the film: long shot, medium shot and close-up are the standard relationships for both. Necessarily, though, the emphasis in television is always on the closer shot because of the size of the screen itself. These easily acceptable transitions, valuable as they are as a stand-by for all visual story telling, can however — and often do — become something of a tyranny. The smoothness can kill real texture and punch. You can, however, only break the rules if the material you are presenting is absolutely mastered.

Now, to know a play, for instance, as thoroughly as this is not usually possible with television. It has to be rehearsed in three weeks. In such a short time it is hardly ever possible for a director not only to create the play, the performances, the camera script, but when he is in the control room to know, inside-out, the very essences and subtleties of those performances, the tiny pauses, the fractional speeds that can make, in cutting, for the polish of a production. It is impossible too for the actors to create richly enough under such conditions. In the theatre the final shape of a production is hardly ever certain until after its opening; in the movies the pattern can be dictated absolutely by the editor; but in television there is only one opportunity to capture each moment. Ideally, perhaps, a major television outfit would have a live theatre attached. A play could then be rehearsed, played and transferred later, by the same director, to the screen. The gain in quality would be staggering. Economically, however, it is impossible in the foreseeable future.

But to return to our main theme: the most hopeful and the most tremendous thing about all Granada output is that there has been any policy at all. This, for a television company, is quite revolutionary. None of the others can present a list of such consistency. This same conviction is apparent, too, in some of Granada’s other programmes in which there is a similar emphasis on controversy. They have shown that here is an organization aware, despite the compromises necessary in a popular medium, of its social responsibilities. In presenting these programmes, Granada is fulfilling some of its responsibilities and attempting to reveal and assess some of the problems that are facing the society that it is serving.

Tony Richardson was Assistant Artistic Director of the English Stage Company at the time this article was written. Born in 1928 in the West Riding, he excelled at school and at university, becoming President of both the Oxford University Dramatic Society and the Experimental Theatre Club. From there he went on to direct for theatre and film, winning two Academy Awards for the latter. He was married to Vanessa Redgrave from 1962 to 1967 and they had two daughters, the actors Natasha and Joely Richardson. He left Redgrave for actor Jeanne Moreau, and while with her fathered a daughter, Katherine, with Grizelda Grimond, the daughter of the then-Liberal Party leader. He died in 1991 from complications due to AIDS.

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WHEN ITV was a-borning I remember my friend Mr Aidan Crawley, who was in charge of inaugurating Independent Television News programmes, speaking to me with immense enthusiasm of the wonderful new techniques whereby the news would be presented pictorially on the screen. He particularly stressed that still pictures would never be shown; everything would be live. I remember that I was very sceptical of these possibilities. It is true that in the United States TV is becoming so powerful that it can almost dictate to politicians, diplomats and sportsmen the hours at which they shall conduct their major activities and compel them to suit their timing to the requirements of the companies. We have not yet reached that stage in this country and I trust we never shall.

In consequence the major news events of the day can very seldom be directly reproduced and there must sometimes be much delay in getting a filmed recording on to The screen. Moreover the main news may originate in Parliament or the Foreign Office or the White House or the Quai d’Orsay and it is obviously technically impossible at this stage to produce a picture justifying the news. Consequently the ITN news programmes, like those of the BBC, consist very largely of a smooth young gentleman in front of the camera reading from notes or a teleprompter news which can be received and digested far more quickly over steam radio.

None the less TV has an immense future in some fields of pictorial journalism. Though the straight news can best be handled by the press and by radio, TV has the unique power to bring before its cameras in a few hours the people who have been making the news. It can interrogate them at close quarters and it can produce in vivid fashion key representatives in any current controversy and vividly portray the issues involved through the leading personalities of the day. But it must be recognized that this is ‘Features’ rather than ‘hard news’.

This is the field which I think Granada can claim that it has experimented with more imaginatively than have any of its competitors. Northern Comment seemed to me a particularly promising feature. Immediately after any party political broadcast two or three commentators were put on to discuss what had just gone before. This was first resisted by the Tories who obtusely insisted on an interval of three hours between their own programme and the comment. All three political parties have now agreed that the criticism should be allowed to follow immediately. I am sure that this is not only in the public interest but also in the interest of the political parties. It is very difficult to get people in this country interested in politics; and lively discussion will tend to get a wider audience for what were previously ex parte statements.

Three other programmes of Granada’s first year which attracted wide attention were Under Fire, What the Papers Say and Youth Is Asking. Many TV discussion programmes suffer from a sweetly reasonable debate between two or more experts. The Chairman often concludes by attempting to show the large measure of agreement between the two sides. (Granada’s ‘Row of the Year’ between Jack Jones, MP, and Hugh Scanlon was a noteworthy exception.) But many questions of the day are controversial and do engender strong feelings. Why not let them be expressed?

Under Fire, presented by Granada, provided one of TV’s most enjoyable features. This was a ‘no holds barred’ programme between a Northern audience and experts in London. On many occasions the atmosphere engendered approached that of a lively political meeting. But Under Fire was not confined to political questions: the cost of bread, design in the home, smog as well as Suez and the Trade Unions are some of the topics this series has covered.

I take a great interest in the press of this country and have consequently looked at a good number of programmes of the feature What the Papers Say. This programme, it seems to me, could be more lively and controversial. I would myself leave one man to do the whole job rather than have a somewhat scrappy discussion introduced half-way through.

Finally Youth Is Asking. This also seems to me a particularly promising programme. It is of interest to people of all ages and should serve to attract youthful minds not only towards television but also to a growing comprehension of current events and current problems.

I am sure that we are only in the very early days of these discussion programmes and my main criticism of them all in general — and I am speaking not only of the three Granada programmes to which I referred above — is that for fear of being thought one-sided there is an exaggerated desire to introduce too many different points of view. Of course this is desirable when it is a discussion, but if there is merely to be a five or ten minute feature commenting on some aspect of the news, I should have thought that one critic or commentator was enough at a time. It should be very easy to hold the balance fairly by inviting personalities of varied outlook and party allegiance from week to week. I think it is unreasonable for anyone to insist that the balance should be held exactly even each week; and any imbalance in one week’s programme could easily be redressed the following week.

I am sure that in these discussions and critiques TV would be well advised to resist the feeble-minded temptation to be ‘all things to all men’.

One of TV’s greatest dangers is to degenerate into undue frivolity. I have seen a good deal of the young men who are building up Granada. They passionately believe that if a serious programme is presented well enough, people will want to look at it, however serious the topic is. If they are correct in their view, TV may yet perform great services to the nation.

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NEWSPAPERS report events after they have happened, and after the story has been written, edited and printed. But television can show the news as it happens and can project it into millions of living-rooms.

This is the story of three reports by television. Today they are something to note; tomorrow, as television develops, such reports will be a routine part of a lively television service.

On March 14, 1957, a Viscount aircraft coming in to land at Ringway Airport, Manchester, crashed on a housing estate at the end of the runway. This happened at 1.46 p.m. At 2.10 p.m., 24 minutes later, news of the crash reached the Granada TV Centre in Manchester. It was immediately decided to send out the Travelling Eyes to give a direct report of the rescue work on television screens.

Everything seemed to be against Granada’s technicians and reporters. The weather was dull and cloudy; the Travelling Eye units were dismantled and under maintenance; the crash had occurred in a Corporation housing estate on the edge of the airport, and the layout of the estate made it difficult to deploy vehicles and to obtain adequate fields of vision for cameras. The mobile telescopic aerial tower which forms part of the unit could not be raised to its full height because of the nearness to the airport. Moreover, some of the equipment and most of the members of the Travelling Eye teams were busy in the studios screening an experimental transmission of a new programme.

None the less, all resources were diverted to the story — and, in the event, Granada gave the earliest and most comprehensive reports of the crash, and also set up a new record for speed in TV reporting. Previously this record had been held by the BBC: within 9½ hours of information being received, an outside broadcast had been on the air.

This Granada broadcast was being seen by Northern viewers 7 hours after the first information had been received.

It was 2.40 p.m. when one of Granada’s research and reporting teams arrived at the scene of the crash: they saw firemen trying to clear a 20-foot-high heap of rubble and blazing wreckage; they learned that no one had been rescued from the plane or the houses into which it had crashed. Within ten minutes the story had been telephoned to Granada’s News Editor, and cine-photographers had left by car for Ringway. At the same time instructions were given to scrap the experimental programme —then ready to start — even though it was an important one and the product of many weeks of hard work.

While the Travelling Eye moved out to Ringway, Granada reporters were tape-recording reports and interviews with eye-witnesses, standing in a garden only ten yards from the wreckage. The first news-flash report was transmitted from the studios at 4.45 p.m. The programme was interrupted again at 5.18 p.m. as further dramatic news came from Ringway. At 5.45 p.m., the film taken by the Granada camera-men went out over the whole Independent Television network. Such was the speed of these events that there was no time to edit the film or to rehearse the accompanying programme of interviews and reports. The actual script, and the timing and order of the interviews, were still being worked out when the newscast went on the air.

While the newscast was being filmed and prepared, the Travelling Eye and its tender, carrying all the cables, the links-truck, the mobile telescopic aerial and the Land Rover, left the Granada TV Centre to mount the on-the-spot outside broadcast of the crash scene. As there was no time to link up with the normal electricity supply the unit took three mobile generators with it.

A producer and a director were assigned to the job; with other assistant directors they were taken straight to the scene of the crash. When they arrived they found the approaches packed with ambulances and fire-engines. The Land Rover towing the generator was lifted on to a grass verge so that clear access could be left for the fire-engines, and the other vehicles were pushed into position. Quickly the cameras were mounted on the 9-foot-high roofs of wash-houses, and cables were fitted to them from a row of houses opposite. By this time it was growing dark, so lamps were mounted to floodlight the scene. The Granada lighting equipment was functioning well before the Fire Brigade’s floodlights.

Manchester’s Fire Chief, Commander Hoare, said later: ‘Granada had some very fine floodlights which were of great assistance to us. I did not realize they were television lights until I saw the cameras. I must say the Granada electricians got them up very quickly and they were extremely efficient.’

By 6 o’clock the director ’phoned Granada to say that the cameras were working and showing pictures. But the sound engineers were meeting with considerable difficulty. Sound is normally carried by GPO line to the TV Centre, but as there was no time to lay a line, for this operation the engineers had to establish a radio link. Eventually, a sound route was established from the link-truck to Didsbury, and from there by a land-line to Granada.

At 9 o’clock it was decided to break into normal programmes in the North with the Travelling Eye report. A staff commentator interviewed two eye-witnesses and the Fire Chief, one camera using a zoom lens covering one side of the wreckage while another, at right-angles to it, covered the interviews and showed a close shot of the twisted propeller lying in front of the wreckage. A third camera, on the roof of the Travelling Eye, gave a general view. This transmission successfully completed, the Editor-in-Chief of Independent Television News was asked if he would like a further live report fed into London to follow ITN’s 10.54 p.m. bulletin. The offer was immediately accepted. Another programme was planned with a further series of interviews and more views of the wreckage and damage.

In this operation all outside broadcast records were broken. Granada reported to Britain, on the spot and while it was happening, what the newspapers could not tell until the following morning.

This was not the first demonstration of Granada’s quickness to seize such an opportunity. As early as May 7, 1956 — only three operating days after Granada had opened — another difficult technical challenge had been met.

On Saturday, May 5, 1956, Manchester City won the Cup Final at Wembley. The football club and civic authorities decided on Sunday that on Monday, May 7, the team should drive in triumph from the railway station to be welcomed by the Lord Mayor on the steps of Manchester Town Hall. By mid-day on Monday it became clear that this was going to be a big news story, for the cup fever which had gripped Manchester and Lancashire showed no sign of declining after the victory. Manchester prepared a dramatic welcome for its team.

At mid-day on Monday, then — five hours and fifty minutes before the train carrying the team was due to arrive — Granada decided to report the welcome by television.

To screen a television report like this is a complex undertaking. It is no mere matter of sending a man with a notebook and a man with a camera to the scene of the story. It is a matter of moving a television studio on wheels, including three cameras, and microphones mounted in four or five vehicles. The cameras have to be mounted and rigged, GPO lines have to be booked, microphones have to be sited, all the various electronic bits and pieces have to be fitted together to send picture and sound to the transmitters. Two days’ hard work is usually needed to prepare the equipment for the transmission of a Travelling Eye programme. But the technicians of Granada, starting at noon, had to compress all this siting, rigging and testing into under three hours.

Because, in a television service, most of the equipment is in use all the time, Granada had no spare team to send to the site. One Travelling Eye team was already out at an old people’s home in Didsbury, ready to transmit a documentary programme later the same day; the other team was at Fallowfield Stadium preparing a programme for the next day.

Cameras, crews and their vehicles, sound-engineers and their microphones were withdrawn from both these programmes and told to report as quickly as possible to Albert Square, Manchester. When they arrived on the site they had to get ready for transmission, racing, as it were, against a train which had already left London. Cameras were unloaded, carried up a winding staircase, and rigged in the best available position, the window of a club which gave a view of the Square and of the road along which the coach carrying the team was to travel. Hundreds of yards of wire and cable were unrolled to connect the cameras to the transmitting van parked outside.

The next and biggest problem was to bring the sound from the Town Hall steps across sixty yards of open space, already crowded with traffic and soon to be filled with tens of thousands of football fans.

There seemed no way of bridging this gap until one of the technicians spotted a Manchester Corporation transport department line-maintenance lorry mounted with a telescopic platform. The driver agreed to elevate the platform of his lorry and carry the cable across the Square, over the tops of the buses, to a microphone in front of the Town Hall.

By 5.20 p.m., thirty minutes before the train was due to arrive, vision and sound were connected, everything was working, and clear pictures of the crowds gathering in the Square could be seen on the monitor screens.

Soon the long zoom lens was picking up a picture of the coach and the Cup as it came down the road. Another camera was showing the faces of the crowds as they cheered. Without a breakdown, without a hitch, the programme went on the air.

This kind of Travelling Eye report must inevitably be rare at the present stage of development of television. The necessary combination of circumstances — a major news story within close range of the Travelling Eye base — does not often occur.

In its first year Granada experimented with other new techniques in television reporting — for example, in the ‘Budget Day Special’, televised on April 9, 1957. In this programme Granada presented to viewers both the Chancellor’s Budget proposals and public comment upon them, all within minutes of the Chancellor’s speech in the House of Commons.

One of the Travelling Eye vans was stationed in the road between the Manchester Central Library and Manchester Town Hall. The van was in wireless contact with London and, as the Chancellor spoke, details of his Budget were passed over this link to two members of the Granada news staff sitting in the van.

They wrote the news-flashes on message forms which were then taken by runners to the garage of the Central Library. Here another member of the team cut the messages down to headlines. The caption artist then painted these on caption cards, which were mounted on a board in public view outside the Library — thus:

‘TV Licences up to £4 on August 1.’

‘Entertainments tax: Tax on live theatre and sport to be abolished.’

‘Petrol: A bob off.’

As these and other budget changes were displayed, members of the public were invited to comment on them before the Travelling Eye cameras and microphones. These impromptu interviews were then televised to the North through the Granada tv Network. Thus viewers were given not only a running commentary on the Budget, but some immediate public reactions.

Throughout the year the Travelling Eyes initiated ninety-five other outside broadcasts. In all, they provided ninety-seven hours of television — and, in doing so, travelled by car the equivalent of one-and-a-half times round the world. During the earlier months of Granada TV Network, indeed, the Travelling Eyes were actually responsible for more programme-hours from the North than all the BBC outside broadcast units together.

Viewers were shown life on a farm, a gypsy encampment and a school for deaf children; they saw people at work in a newspaper office, a fire station and a cheese factory; they saw places such as Wigan, York and the Lancashire seaside resorts. They went to horse shows, pigeon races, the Liverpool Show, and the Royal Lancashire Show.

Another series consisted of straight sports coverage — cricket between Lancashire and Australia and Lancashire and Worcestershire, baseball at Burtonwood, American football, International cycling at Fallowfield Stadium, and the football match of the year between Manchester United and Real Madrid.

A series called ‘While the City Sleeps’ showed the night-time activities of a great city — hospital, railway marshalling yards, telephone exchange, transport cafe, police headquarters, airfield, Salvation Army hostel, colliery.

The significance of these outside broadcasts is not only in their variety and scope, not only in their record-breaking speed, but in their essential contribution to the true nature of television: here indeed it is doing something which cannot be done, with comparable immediacy and impact, in any other medium.

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A TELEVISION network must serve the tastes of many kinds of viewers. There must be light entertainment as well as serious drama, popular music and variety as well as news, information and discussion.

Some of television’s most difficult problems have arisen in providing light entertainment which is original, fresh and suitable to the medium.

The music-hall, the ‘straight’ theatre, the cinema and the kerb-side busker have evolved patterns of light entertainment that can be traced back to the Commedia dell’ Arte. The range is wide and well-established, from the red-nosed dialect comedian to the sophisticated satirist in the topical revue; from the broad music-hall sketch with collapsing honeymoon beds and nagging mothers-in-law to the acidulated intellectual skit. By means of varying formulae, sometimes traditional, sometimes based on American models, sometimes new and indigenous, the media of light entertainment have striven to excite the belly-laugh, or the civilized chuckle.

Today television is the major medium of light entertainment, and it sets a fast pace. An old-time comic could tour the halls for a couple of years with the same opening gag, the same patter, the same sentimental songs, the same exit line. Transpose him to television and he must create his act anew with each appearance: every night is opening night; indeed, for television programme-planners, every night can be the opening nights of half-a-dozen half-hours to be filled with fresh entertainment.

Even in the pioneering days it became clear that it was not enough merely to put the stage performer before the camera and leave him to go through his act as in the theatre. There is a place for this kind of entertainment in television — in the straightforward music-hall programme before a live audience, for example — but it is not original television. It is music-hall photographed for TV—a kind of outside broadcast.

So far, four main distinct types of television light entertainment have been evolved; the situation comedy, the viewer participation programme, the ‘series’ programme, and the personality programme.

It is, perhaps, not too fanciful to relate the popularity of some at least of these four kinds of programme to the intensely domestic nature of the medium. Television is part of modern family life: ‘going to a show’ is an occasional family event—or, more often, something that individual members of the family do on their own, or with friends.

The appeal of the situation comedy is based on the regular presentation of a group of characters who are, in time, thought of almost as intimates of the family. The situations in which they are involved are not impossibly remote from the viewers’ own family experience, but everyday life is transmitted in them by comic exaggeration. Granada’s most successful essay in this field was My Wife’s Sister, featuring Eleanor Summerfield — a series considered by some critics equal to the most popular American situation comedies.

Quizzes and panel-games give the viewer, vicariously or in person, some degree of participation. When the quiz or panel-game involves the questioning of experts on their own subjects, viewer-participation is almost entirely vicarious. Most viewers cannot themselves know most of the answers, but they identify themselves intensely with the studio contestants: they share their delight in winning and their despondency in defeat—and take pride in their sportsmanship in accepting the toughest challenges.

The sense of participation is keener in the type of quiz and panel-game requiring an average standard of general knowledge and experience. Here the viewer is on the same level as the studio contestant or panel. He can pit his wits against the programme in competition with the contestants. It has been Granada’s policy to produce shows of this type, such as ‘Spot the Tune’, ‘Make Up Your Mind’ and ‘Black and White’, rather than the more limited and expert type of panel and quiz programme.

The ‘series’ programmes — sometimes semi-documentary in character — consist either of short self-contained playlets featuring regular characters or of ‘continued-in-our-next’ serials which seek to create suspense by melodramatic plot-structure.

With the exception of the music-hall show, the personality programme is perhaps the least intrinsically televised form of light entertainment on tv. It consists, basically, of a sketch or recital built round a popular comedian or singer, and is really an offshoot of the stage revue. In television, however, this type of programme can sometimes have a more immediate impact on the audience than is possible in even an intimate living theatre.

Television cannot be static. Its enormous consumption of material and the developing tastes of viewers demand constant experiments not least in light entertainment. On first nights, every night, every week, this will always be a major challenge to television producers and artists.

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